THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY 





THE NORSEMEN AND THEIR RAVEN PILOT. 




The Romance of Discovery 

A Thousand Years of Exploration and 
the Unveiling of Continents 



BY 



WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS 

MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 
AUTHOR OF "THE MIKADO'S EMPIRE," "COREA, THE HERMIT NATION 
" BRAVE LITTLE HOLLAND," AND " SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON " 



ILLUSTRATED BY 

FRANK T. MERRILL 







BOSTON 
W. A. WILDE & COMPANY 
25 Bromfield Street 






\^ 




Copyright, 1897, 

By W. a. Wilde & Company. 

All rights reserved. 



THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 



^7 



^ 4 



©ctiicatcti 
TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS 

WHETHER BORN IN OR BROUGHT TO 

Cjje raorlti's Kcijj anti Better lEurope 

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



PREFACE. 



In this four hundredth anniversary year of John Cabot's 
landfall in North America, I have written, at the request 
of my publishers, this book entitled " The Romance of 
Discovery." It is intended to be the first of a series of 
three works in illustration of American history. The 
second volume will deal with the romance of colonization. 
The third will tell the story of American victories in war 
and diplomacy. 

Strictly speaking, the discovery and exploration of 
America form but one of many phases in an ever-continu- 
ing movement of the Aryan race ; yet I have tried to 
show how America was reached and populated from the 
West, as well as from the East. I have not treated the 
achievement of Columbus as though it were a strange and 
unconnected episode, but rather as a link in a chain of 
events which issued in a knowledge to mankind of the 
Old as well as of the New World. I have tried to do 
justice to the various nationalities of Europe that took 
part in making known the continent between Europe and 
Asia. If I have given to Portugal, Holland, and Japan 
more credit than is usually bestowed by American authors, 
I have no other apology to make than the love of truth 
and fair play. Neither in this volume nor in any other 
history of the discovery of America, do our English ances- 

7 



8 PREFACE. 

tors figure very largely. Providence seems to have or- 
dained that the Latin races should be pioneers, and that 
the English should enter into the labors of their southern 
brethren, in order that the best part of this continent 
might be won for the ideals of Christianized Germanic 
civilization. In the next volume, when the story of the 
colonies will be told, I trust that our English forefathers 
may receive the honors due them. 

While following the best authorities, sincerely endeavor- 
ing to give true history and to exclude what is doubtful 
and unauthenticated, I have tried to show the powerful 
influence of romantic ideas, of myths and of fairy tales, 
upon human action, — in a word, the power of the world 
of imagination and fancy upon this world of toil, and 
especially upon the discovery and exploration of America. 
I trust that not a little personal familiarity, through 
travel, with our own and some of the other countries 
and the routes referred to, will but add to the value of 
this work. 

My best thanks are due to my friend, William Nelson 
Noble, Esq., of Ithaca, whose criticisms and suggestions 
have been of service to me in the preparation of this 
work. 

May this humble contribution to the history of the 
noblest of all lands nourish American patriotism, while 
hastening — though perhaps only as the raindrop hastens 
the harvest — that federation of the nations of the earth 
which is implied in our common Christianity. 

W. E. G. 

Ithaca on Cayuga Lake, March 15, 1897. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



I. The Oldest Route to Our Continent 

II. The First Families of America .... 

III. The Blond Sailors and their Raven Pilots . 

IV. The Norsemen dash out into the Deep Sea . 
V. How the Japanese helped to discover America 

VI. The Old Trade Routes to the East 

VII. Portugal founds a Training School of Discoverers 

VIII. Italy, the Home of Commerce and Exploration . 

IX. Columbus sails West to reach the Far East 

X, The Pope cuts the World in Half .... 

XI. John Cabot sails to seek Antilia and the Seven 

Cities 

XII. America receives its Name, and the World is sailed 

ROUND 

XIII. El Dorado, or the Gilded Chieftain 

XIV. The French among the Codfish and the Whales 
XV. The Land of Flowers and the Fountain of Youth 

XVI. A Lonely Tramp across the Continent . 

XVII. Coronado and the Exploration of New Mexico . 

XVIII. English Slave-Traders and Buccaneers . 

XIX. Drake ploughs an English Furrow round the World 

9 



13 

20 
28 
35 
45 
55 
65 
79 
90 
98 

105 

112 

126 

134 
146 
161 
168 
183 
195 



lO CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XX. Raleigh's Dream of a New English Nation . . 207 

XXI. Captain John Smith explores Virginia and the New 

England Coast 217 

XXII. The Dutch attempt the Northeast Passage and open 

the Seas of the Orient 221 

XXIII. The Orange, White, and Blue in the Hudson River 233 

XXIV. Captain Block's Exploring Cruise in the Yacht 

" Restless " 246 

XXV. The Bourbon Lilies in Canada. Champlain's Decisive 

Shot 258 

XXVI. La Salle seeks China and discovers the Mississippi . 269 
XXVII. Native-born American Explorers of the Eighteenth 

Century 283 

XXVIII. Nineteenth Century Explorations West of the Mis- 
sissippi . 293 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



PAGE 

The Norsemen and their Raven Pilot . . , Frontispiece 33 

Christopher Columbus at the La RAbida Monastery ... 88 

I Cartier sets up a Cross in Newfoundland . . . . -138 

A Brother Padilla finds the Cross set up by Coronado . .174 

'1 Arrival of the "Half Moon" at the Hudson River. . . 238 

II 



4. 



THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 



yi^o^ 



CHAPTER I. 

THE OLDEST ROUTE TO OUR CONTINENT. 

IN geology, America Is the old world ; but in 
human history It is the new one. Before the 
other continents were shaped by the hand of God, 
He had already lifted up out of the waters the 
northern portion of America. Before ever a road 
was made by man, great natural highways had been 
trodden by animals whose existence preceded his 
own. Lonor before His creatures had found them 
out, the paths of God were in the sea, and His 
ways were upon the waters. 

When first placed upon this globe, man was only 
a little child, who, as he grew up, but very gradually 
began to perceive the wisdom, love, and care of 
his Heavenly Father. Many thousands of years 
passed before he knew that there was one "gulf 
stream " in the Atlantic Ocean and another in the 
Pacific. Heat, light, and electricity are forces 

13 



14 THE ROMANCE OE DISCOVERY. 

which, ever since the creation, have been at ail 
times ready for the use of man ; but it is only in 
our own ao^e that he has tamed and harnessed 
them, even as he has tamed and harnessed the 
animals that serve him, and it is but recently that 
he has begun to do this. 

The great prophet tells us that God did not 
create the earth in vain ; He formed it to be in- 
habited. But the question arises. Did men spread 
over the earth like plants and animals '^. We have 
been taught that the race originated in what is 
called the " old world," — Asia. On that continent 
written history began ; and so Asia must be con- 
sidered as being the old home of civilization. 
Even so late as the fifteenth century, Europeans 
had never dreamed of a " new world." It is true 
that the Norweo'ians discovered Iceland in the 
ninth century, and Greenland in the tenth ; but 
these islands were believed to be a part of the old 
world, — Europe, Asia, and Africa. Indeed, neither 
the suggestion of a " new world," nor the idea of 
reaching Asia by sailing westward, could possibly 
have entered the mind of man, until he had first 
thought of the earth as being a globe, instead of 
being flat like a table. 

There had long been two natural passageways 
from Asia to the " new world," both of which were 
well used for many centuries before Europe had 



THE OLDEST ROUTE TO OUR CONTINENT. 1 5 

acquired any knowledge of America. Let us con- 
sider them. 

Glancing along the line of the Arctic Circle, 
either on a globe or a Mercator's chart, we per- 
ceive that there is a region of ice extending 
through Norway, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, British 
America, Greenland, and Iceland, over which one 
might make a journey around the top of the world. 
Travellers going eastward from Lapland could 
have reached Lapland again by land journeys, ex- 
cept where, in their skin boats, they were com- 
pelled to encounter the perils of the sea, crossing 
the narrow Behring Strait and the three water pas- 
sages to Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Along 
this route the " new world " was accessible to the 
inhabitants of the old one, who might reach it, 
going either east or west. 

We are certain that in prehistoric times, journeys 
must have been made over this thoroughfare ; for 
the Eskimo people, who lived in snow huts among 
the walrus and the polar bears, are found both in 
Asia and America. 

There is another road to America which God 
made, most probably, before there was a man on 
the earth. This is a water-route along which one 
might easily have journeyed, even in the childhood 
days of the race, when the boatman had no com- 
pass, chart, or sextant. Although there were no 



1 6 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

lighthouses to guide his course, there were great 
landmarks pointing the directions of going and 
coming. We shall also find that both the winds 
and currents were most favorable for a trip east- 
ward to America. Very curiously, this ocean path- 
way is along a line of earthquakes, and of volcanoes 
which often furnish light at night and smoke by 
day, so that pillars of fire and of cloud have guided 
wanderers in the wilderness ocean, from the old 
seats of nations to the lonely continent, America. 
Man's first need is for food, then for clothing and 
shelter. Along this route the traveller can find 
plenty to eat, since nature has established, as it 
were, restaurants at stations along the way. More- 
over, shelter has been provided for him ; while 
all sorts of material for clothing, both that 
which grows out of the ground and that which 
grows on the backs of animals, have been ever 
at hand. 

Thus the Power, or the Providence, that made 
and furnished this great and wonderful highway 
was ever inviting the peoples of the old world to 
discover the new lands toward the sunrise. He 
not only made the ocean canal, but He beckoned 
onward. Let us look at this remarkable sea-road. 

In the Pacific Ocean, between the Tropic of 
Cancer and Micronesia, there is a great current 
which flows up from the equator (where, under the 



THE OLDEST ROUTE TO OUR CONTINENT. 1/ 

vertical rays of the sun, the water almost boils), and 
which, moving for the most part westward, meets 
the great hot drifts coming up past Borneo and 
the Philippines. Thus both streams form a great, 
deep blue river in the sea, which, rushing like a 
mill race, scours the front of Formosa and the long 
chain of Japanese Islands. It then crosses east- 
ward toward the Aleutian Islands, and, flowing 
down to Vancouver, passes along the whole west- 
ern front of the United States, Mexico, and Central 
America. It is a curious fact that in this warm 
and indigo-blue stream anything that can float will 
move over a great circle of the earth. 

Moreover, all the way from the Malay Archi- 
pelago to Vancouver, the water is comparatively 
shallow. Consequently it is a great feeding ground 
for fish and other marine creatures which supply 
nourishment to man, and attract from the interior 
highlands down to the coast, such other animals as 
also prey upon this sea-food. Even a savage boy, 
without much trouble, might easily make a journey 
along this ocean canal, because he would always 
have landmarks to guide his course ; for all along 
there are thousands of islands full of inlets and har- 
bors, which are like stepping-stones and may be 
used for resting-places. The many-colored waters 
indicate, like a barometer, the condition of the 
weather and furnish daily probabilities. Even the 



1 8 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

fishes and the birds are good pilots, and one need 
rarely be troubled with any terrors of the lonely 
deep. 

Thus, along a great circle of the earth, there is 
a well-marked ocean pathway, illumined by light- 
giving volcanoes, provided with the proper winds 
to bend the sail and furnish motor power, having a 
temperature substantially uniform along the whole 
route, and abundantly supplied with food. This 
great, warm stream, the " Nile of the Pacific," de- 
posits over the beds of landlocked areas, tropical 
silt and lower forms of marine creatures which feed 
fish and animals, thus contributing to the life of 
man. The best fishing-grounds of the world are 
in this ocean river, along which, as we shall see, 
America received most of its inhabitants who came 
from Asia. 

There is this great difference between the North 
Atlantic and the North Pacific. To navigate the 
ocean between America and Europe, one must sail 
boldly out from sight of land without mountain 
peaks or islands to guide his course. In the far 
north, there is only the little Faroe Island group 
between Iceland and Norway. Further south there 
is nothing ; and the route from continent to conti- 
nent shows only unbroken water. What wonder 
that on the ancient maps the Atlantic Ocean was 
indicated as being a great "Sea of Darkness".? 



THE OLDEST ROUTE TO OUR CONTINENT. 1 9 

What wonder that no American Indian ever drifted 
away to Europe ? 

It is otherwise in the Pacific Ocean, which is 
spotted all over with islands, especially in the north 
and south. Above and below the Equator is a great 
archipelago. Along the Tropic of Cancer are the 
Hawaiian and other islands in mid-ocean, and the 
Japanese and Philippine islands are nearer the con- 
tinent. In the northern Pacific are the Kuriles, — 
well called " the smokers," — with the Aleutian 
Islands not far off, and then Alaska. 

Let us now look at these Asians who became 
the first Americans, whom the sailors from Norway 
called " Skralligs," and the discoverer from Italy 
named " Indians." 



CHAPTER II. 

THE FIRST FAMILIES OF AMERICA. 

THERE are many ways of learning history. 
We read it not only from written documents, 
monuments, and coins, but also from the science of 
ethnology, from geological relics, from language, 
and from what is written on the body of man. We 
know that civilization always springs up along the 
water, in warm river valleys, such as those of the 
Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Ganges, and Yang-tse. 
While the people having writing and books — the 
Egyptians, Assyrians, Hindoos, and Chinese — were 
growing into nations, there was a human stream of 
the dark-skinned races, reddish, brown, and yellow, 
moving along natures oldest highway from Asia 
into America. One set of peoples was of the 
northern or Eskimo type, like their cousins in 
Siberia. Another set had red skins, like the 
copper-colored Formosan head-hunters of to-day. 

When southern Europeans first reached the 
West Indies in the fifteenth century, the Eskimos 
occupied the region just below and inside the Arc- 
tic Circle. The various Indian tribes roaming over 



20 



THE FIRST FAMILIES OF AMERICA. 21 

what is now the United States, north and east, 
seemed to have developed in and migrated from 
the valley of the Columbia River. In the Missis- 
sippi valley were the buffalo hunters, who lived 
and migrated with these animals. In the east, the 
Iroquois and Algonquins lived on fish and deer, 
and had maize lands. In what is now the south- 
west of the United States and Mexico, there was a 
great group of tribes living in the dry regions. In 
South America, the home of mighty forests as large 
as Europe, were many tribes of Indians. In Peru 
they had developed something like civilization. 

Although the inhabitants of the whole continent 
of America seem, on first view, so different, and 
although there were one hundred and twenty sepa- 
rate families of languages, yet all the tribes in 
America except the Eskimos were much alike in 
one great social principle. Marriage must be 
inside the tribe and descent remain in the female 
line. There were many handicrafts and cunning 
devices of hunter, fisherman, warrior, farmer, or 
weaver; but nothing absolutely new was invented 
on this continent. Every one of the aboriginal 
American arts — of industry, of war, and of orna- 
ment — can be matched in Asia, Oceanica, or Eu- 
rope. All the myths and folklore of the Indians 
point to their origin in the northwest and to Asia 
beyond. 



22 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

How numerous the inhabitants of America were 
in 1492, we do not know, but we are certain that 
the population was densest where food was plenti- 
ful and readily obtained, and in regions of country 
where paths and communications were easy and 
natural. Great areas of the continent, some of 
them larger than Europe, were almost wholly un- 
inhabited by man. In British America there is a 
forest seventeen hundred miles long from east to 
west, and a thousand miles wide from north to 
south. This was not used or traversed by the red 
men until game grew scarce in the Hudson's Bay 
region, when trappers were compelled to go farther 
afield for flesh or furs. Another stretch of timber 
land covers a large part of the state of Washington 
and British Columbia. In the valley of the Ama- 
zon River, we are in darkest South America. The 
thicket, covering much of northern Brazil and the 
eastern portions of those countries between Brazil 
and the Pacific, is twenty-one hundred miles long 
by thirteen hundred miles wide. Very few people 
dwelt in these regions. 

So also in the desert of Nevada, and in the great 
dry and thirsty lands of Arizona, New Mexico, and 
Texas, but few human beings could exist away from 
the river valleys. As a rule, the mountains, the 
thick forests, and the waterless regions were but 
slightly used or occupied. We may say at once. 



THE FIRST FAMILIES OF AMERICA. 23 

that over a large portion of the Americas, the 
only human habitations were those of hunters and 
occasional wanderers. The mass of the aborigines 
o:athered alons^ the watercourses, at the river 
mouths on the seacoast, and in fertile valleys; in 
a word, where they could get food, find good 
trails on land, and secure water-ways for their 
canoes. 

SeekinQ- food and makino^ war were the chief 
occupations of the first Americans, who were 
mostly of the stone age. Their land journeys 
were on foot. The Eskimos and Canadian Indians 
had dogs to pull their sleds. Down in Peru they 
used a little camel, the llama, but the chief means 
of transportation were the human back and legs. 
Even in their savage state, men and women had 
many wants. The fishermen living near the sea- 
shore needed what the hunters dwelling in the 
interior could furnish. Thus barter grew up. 
The seacoast tribes furnished salt, dried clams, 
oysters, and fish, shells for wampum and ornament ; 
while the interior tribes supplied meat, skins, flint 
arrow-heads, pipe-stone, and tobacco. The women 
did the drudgery of tilling the fields, cooking, and 
housekeeping, besides rearing the children ; while 
the men made weapons and tools, hunted, fished, 
and fought. 

Who built the mounds, we do not know, nor can 



24 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

we tell whether the mound-builders were a race 
separate from and previous to the red Indians ; or, 
whether, as is most probable, they were the same 
people. But centuries before any white man from 
Europe saw America, there was a lively commerce 
between these mound-builders ; for among their 
remains we find obsidian knives from Mexico and 
the Yellow Stone Park, mica from North Carolina, 
gold, silver, meteoric iron, and shells, from the Gulf 
of Mexico. Indian commerce in its total bulk was 
enormous. In many old quarries we find the aban- 
doned workshops of these ancient artificers, and 
hard by the unnoticed relics along old streams, once 
dammed by beavers, we see their trapping grounds. 
The industries of the Americans were varied and 
remarkable. The introduction of new weapons 
from Europe, like firearms, axes, and iron arrow- 
heads, destroyed the old Indian trades and work- 
shops, just as steam and improved machinery, 
applied to weaving in England, have left the ruins 
of many water-power mills along the inland streams. 
European tools, clothing, money, and hundreds of 
other things which the red men wanted, threw out 
of employment thousands of expert native workmen 
and left the old workshops, in the quarries, the for- 
est, and the seashore, deserted and useless. In 
prehistoric times, before white men destroyed the 
old native crafts, some of the Indian specialists 



THE FIRST FAMILIES OF AMERICA. 25 

were expert bow-makers ; others chipped arrow- 
heads. One man made spear-points or chisels, 
another scrapers, and still others dishes or jewellery. 
The fingers of some squaws were nimble in mould- 
ing earthen vessels, others were expert in weaving 
and embroidering, while still others gathered up 
shells in summer and strung them into wampum 
during the winter. The younger and stronger men 
became famous as warriors or hunters and rose to 
be chiefs. There was almost as much division of 
labor and consequent expertness in some tribes as 
there is in modern civilized life. 

Wherever groups of Indians who were able to do 
something more than hunt or fish, could plant and 
raise crops and store food away and engage in traf- 
fic, there a higher state of civilization was reached. 
In the long run, the farmer is always able to excel 
the mere hunter. In Peru the Indians knew how 
to make hard metal tools and build stone fortresses, 
and possessed well-laid-out cities. They wove cloth, 
made wonderful gold ornaments, cut statues, and had 
a powerful military organization. In Mexico and 
in Peru, also, they irrigated their lands. They were 
expert in digging canals, in making dikes, and in 
chiselling and polishing hard stone. In Arizona 
they had towns and fortresses on the tops of rocks, 
with dwellings hollowed out in the cliffs, and they 
had made some progress in the arts. In New 



26 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

York, between the Niagara and the Hudson, the 
five Iroquois tribes had great farms of corn, beans, 
squashes, and pumpkins, and could store up large 
quantities of food. They built long houses of tim- 
ber and bark, each of which held a number of fami- 
lies. They had well-situated and fortified towns, 
while their commerce was highly developed. Their 
confederacy was a remarkable political structure, 
and there were among them not only thousands of 
fierce warriors, but many leaders skilled in state- 
craft and diplomacy. 

So it was not an empty wilderness which the 
Norsemen or Columbus were to discover, but a 
land populated with millions of human beings, 
whose social life, languages, political and military 
methods, arms and architecture, commerce and 
trade, were well worth the study of the new-comers 
from Europe. They even had some art in communi- 
cating ideas and various methods of handing down 
tradition. The native Americans were probably as 
religious in their way as the Europeans who con- 
quered them were in theirs. The men of the stone 
age had already discovered and occupied this con- 
tinent lonQ[ before the invaders from across the 
Atlantic appeared with iron, agriculture, writing, 
and a superior religion. 

As had already happened on a smaller scale in 
India, China, Japan, and other countries, so here in 



THE FIRST FAMILIES OF AMERICA. 2/ 

America the same thing took place and the same 
story may be told again. It was one of discovery, 
exploration, colonization, conquest, with much cru- 
elty on the side of the conquerors and some 
improvement of the aborigines. In most portions 
the amalgamation of conqueror and conquered fol- 
lowed. In others the ancient inhabitants were first 
enslaved and then, partially or wholly, converted to 
the imported faith. It was a mutual discovery 
which the Americans and Europeans made of each 
other; and it is more than probable that they who 
had more light did not act with any more reason or 
righteousness. How the different nations who dis- 
covered the aborigines treated them, — the one for 
the most part preserving and the other destroying, 
— we shall learn in the course of our three sepa- 
rate narratives, "The Romance of Discovery," "The 
Romance of Colonization," and " The Romance of 
Conquest." 

The first of these North American people ever 
seen by Europeans were called " Skralligs," as we 
shall see. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE BLOND SAILORS AND THEIR RAVEN PILOTS. 

UP in the far north of Europe, in the high lati- 
tudes where the summer days are very long, 
often with eighteen or twenty hours of sun or twi- 
light, but where the winter days are very short, live 
the hardy Scandinavians. They fill all the region 
between the Baltic and the North Seas, and between 
the Gulf of Bothnia and the Atlantic Ocean. Theirs 
is a great mountain land full of dark and gloomy 
forests, with uncounted lakes and streams which 
never dry up, because fed by the endless snows and 
ice. 

Along the shore of Norway, from the North Cape, 
where one can see the summer sun at midnight, 
down to " the naze," or nose, runs a coast which is 
walled with mountains, but pierced all along with 
fiords. These are deep narrow cracks in the earth's 
crust, full of water, with many a cove and beach, 
where boats can be built and launched, and where 
hardy men and women are reared. Together with 
the fiords are numberless islands, rich in meat and 
eggs, and birds and fish. Here is situated one of 

28 



THE BLOND SAILORS AND THEIR RAVEN PILOTS. 29 

nature's great schools for the training of brave and 
hardy sailors. 

In this great region of the Norsemen, which in- 
cludes Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, has long 
lived a fair-haired, blue-eyed race ; hardy, vigorous, 
and daring, fond of the sea, and not afraid of its 
waves or storms. How long these blond folks have 
lived here, cannot be reckoned. Asfes acjo their 
ancestors dwelt among these same rocks and waters. 
They did not become Christians until about the 
time of Christianity's millennial year. While in the 
warm and rich region of the Mediterranean, great 
cathedrals and splendid edifices in stone rose to the 
glory of God in Christ, and the stories of Bethlehem, 
of Nazareth, of Jerusalem, and of Calvary were fa- 
miliar in every household, these people in the far 
north were still mostly pagans. Some tribes of 
them, marching overland, but oftener rowing out in 
their barges, and sailing in their ships, had reached 
the shores of Netherlands, Great Britain, France, 
and Germany. Besides war and slaughter, battle 
and burning, they had made settlements. Some 
had even gone to the Mediterranean Sea and sailed 
as far as Constantinople. Coming back, they told 
of the wonders of the warm lands where oranges, 
lemons, and olives grew. 

Fierce and bloody were these pagan Norsemen 
who enjoyed nothing more than a raid upon French 



30 



THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 



or Dutch market towns, many a one of which they 
left in ashes. They also liked to go into Christian 
churches and defile or burn the sacred emblems, 
of whose meaning they knew nothing. For centu- 
ries. Christian people kneeling on their church floors 
prayed every Sunday in their litany, " From the fury 
of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us." When 
the English caught the robbers, Dane or Norse, 
they used to skin them alive and nail their hides 
to the church doors. In the Netherlands they cut 
off their heads on the wet sea-beach. 

Yes, these men, ancestors of many of us, were 
pagans. They had a mythology which explained 
to them the world and creation. It did not tell of 
a garden of Eden, so warm that a man and his wife 
could live without clothing and not feel cold, but of 
an original northern chaos, or rather of two worlds. 
In one, there were ice-cold streams, icebergs, and 
snow crystals. In the other, which was bright and 
hot, sat a guardian deity with a flaming sword. 
When the two worlds met in conflict, and the sparks 
and the frost vapor came together, large drops tric- 
kled down. These took the form of an immense 
giant named Ymer, and of a great cow^ named Aud- 
humbla. The cow nourished the mighty giant and 
fed herself by licking the salty frost crystals on the 
rocks. After three days a man named Bure was 
produced, and there being a giantess named Bestla, 



THE BLOND SAILORS AND THEIR RAVEN PILOTS. 31 

three sons were born. These, when they grew up, 
slew the giant Ymer, and out of his dead body they 
made the present world. 

So, to the boys and girls who grew up in the 
old Norse world, the earth was the giant's flesh, 
the ocean was his blood, the rocks were his bones, 
the trees of the forest were his hairs, the great, 
round, vaulted sky was his skull, and the clouds 
were his brains. However, the giants had not all 
died, and there were wars between them and the 
men. 

Dwarfs and elves lived on the earth, while beneath 
it were the inhabitants of the lower world. The 
gods and the men were friends, but the giants and 
the underworld people were the enemies of both 
gods and men. 

Wonderful is the Norse mythology, which these 
first discoverers of the Faroe Islands and Iceland 
believed. Curiously enough, showing how mythol- 
ogy is true to nature, of all the giants, ^gir, the 
ruler of the sea, is the wealthiest. So rich indeed 
is he, that he once entertained all the sfods in his 
magnificent hall in grand style. It was over the 
seas of ^gir that the hardy Norseman rowed and 
sailed to reach the rich lands of the South, and seize 
the wealth of towns and churches. The giant's blood, 
as they called the ocean, gave them food, and ever 
tempted them to adventure and booty. 



32 



THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 



One of these Northmen discovered Greenland, 
but did not name it. Later, in the year 982, Erik 
the Red, who had been banished there from Iceland, 
gave an example to all land agents and speculators, 
who wish to sell lands, whether valuable or worthless, 
by writing an attractive advertisement. Erik named 
this gray and white country of rock, ice, and polar 
bears, Greenland, in order to attract colonists. 

The Norwegians were the first Europeans to see 
and dwell in America. In their days there was no 
compass, chart, sextant, or chronometer. The splen- 
did equipments of modern ships and the science of 
navigation based on mathematics, were unknown ; 
but there were bold hearts, iron-like muscles, hardy 
bodies, and strong wills. God's lights in the skies 
were theirs. The sun, rising and setting every day, 
gave them true direction east and west, — a path of 
golden light, — as they thought, over the blood of 
Ymer. At night the glorious stars, set into the 
round skull of the world-giant, shed their mild radi- 
ance. How easy to sail straight westward ! 

No wonder that Iceland was early discovered, 
colonized, and made one of the homes of these 
blond and blue-eyed people. No wonder, either, 
that Greenland was so early known and visited 
that when the South Europeans learned geog- 
raphy from the Arabs and began to think of the 
matter, they considered Greenland to be a part 



THE BLOND SAILORS AND THEIR RAVEN PILOTS. 33 

of the old world, because it belonged to European 
people. 

But what happened, when clouds hid sun and star, 
when mist and fog covered the surface of the ocean, 
when adverse winds blew and terrible currents drove 
the ships out of their courses, and storms howled 
and roared, sending rain, sleet, and ice into the faces 
and over the bodies of the hardy mariners? Then, 
to the Norsemen's fancy, the brains of Ymer were 
blowing about, hiding the light and the land. With- 
out chart or compass, what could these vikings — 
men of the viks or bays, yet true kings of the sea — 
do.^ 

In the earlier world, as among the Indians of the 
forest to-day, the average man lived nearer to the 
beasts and birds. The creatures of fin, fur, feather, 
and hoof were like companions. The man often 
lived under the same roof with his horses, cows, and 
pet birds, and when he died, he wanted them buried 
with him. He understood the language, motions, 
and powers of the brutes better than does the civil- 
ized man in our time. So, when the Norseman 
sailed far from land, he took a pilot with him. This 
pilot was black and feathered. It was a raven. Be- 
fore ever he had heard of Father Noah and his ark, 
he took this ancient friend of man, yet so much 
feared, in his ship with him. Far out at sea, be- 
yond the roar of breakers, or the scent of smoke or 



34 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

trees, or even amid wintry gales and cloud-covered 
skies, or in fog or mist, the raven was set free. 
While in sight, its course was watched with intense 
straining eyes. If the bird came back, then land 
was not near. If it did not return, the men rowed 
with all speed in the direction of its flight, and soon 
they landed on some shore. 

Robert Browning, the poet, once wrote : — 

" God guides me and the bird." 

In the story of Ararat, of the Norseman, and of 
the first Italian in America, "our little brothers of 
the air," with wisdom taught them by the Almighty, 
found for Noah, for Leif, and for Columbus, the 
path to land. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE NORSEMEN DASH OUT INTO THE DEEP SEA. 

IT was in a.d. 986 that Bjarne, an Icelander, while 
on his way to Greenland with Erik the Red, to 
help make a settlement in the new country, had 
a most wonderful adventure. Three days after 
they had left Iceland the wind blew from the 
north, and continued during several days, driving 
them far southward and into a fosf. When at 
length the sun appeared, so that they could dis- 
cover east and west, and north and south, they 
found land along the horizon, but no part of it 
corresponded with Greenland. On this new and 
strange shore they saw no high mountains, but 
only wooded hills. Being so far out of their 
course, they did not venture to leave their ship, 
but, turning round, sailed northward and finally 
reached Greenland, having twice, in the meanwhile, 
sighted land on the left. 

What could this new land have been, if not 
some part of northeastern America ? The story of 
Bjarne's adventure is told in the Sagas, which are 

35 



36 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

famous old Norwegian books of poetry. It is be- 
lieved by some, that Bjarne first saw some part of 
Maine or Massachusetts, then Nova Scotia, and then 
Newfoundland. A few years later Bjarne came to 
Norway and told of his discovery. Leif Erikson, 
who heard him, was mightily excited, and wanted 
to see that new land again. So he bought Bjarne's 
ship, and gathered thirty-five hardy men to go out 
and look upon these new lands. 

In the same kind of stoutly ribbed, undecked 
boats, such as have been dug up occasionally out of 
the old vikings' graves, let us imagine Leif Erikson 
and his crew setting out from Norway in the year 
A.D. looo. Leif is a hardy Icelander, thirty years 
of age. He is not a pagan, but has become a 
Christian ; for the bright light of the new religion 
is breaking over the dark forests of Norway, and 
already the harper and minstrels are singing songs 
in the king's court, about Bethlehem and its mes= 
sage of peace. 

Like so many later ones, this is a missionary 
expedition. King Olaf wants Leif to go to Green- 
land, and preach the story of Christ and the Cross 
to the natives. Without religion, America would 
never have been discovered by Norse, Spaniard, or 
Italian. This is the first motive that launches the 
ship and drives it westward ; but there is also 
another which appeals to the spirit of daring and 



NORSEMEN DASH OUT INTO THE DEEP SEA. 37 

adventure, and by this motive the hardy young 
man Leif is impelled. 

We can imaoine his startino^. A Norse boat at 
that time was heavily built, with long planks or 
strips of wood riveted with iron and braced with 
knee-timbers, stoutly tied with thongs. In the 
strong gunwales, the oar locks were solid and part 
of the wood. The huge prow rose up in the form 
of a dragon, or was shaped like the head of a cow. 
The captain stood on a platform near the bow, for 
there was no deck. The keel and swelling sides 
were so arranged that when run on shore the boat 
could be covered over and used as a house. In 
time of favorable winds, the seats of the rowers 
were empty, and their battle shields hung along 
the gunwales. Instead of a high stern-post and 
rudder, there was on the right, near the end, a long 
and wide oar, — the " steer-board," from whence we 
get our word "star-board." On a fair day their 
short and small flags would flutter at the mast- 
head. Anciently, these had pictures of the raven 
or dragon on them. Probably, since Leif was a 
Christian, there would be at the top of the mast, 
and above its one big sail, the figure of the cross, 
which might also be on its pennon. Perhaps he 
carried a cage of ravens as winged pilots. 

The comforts of life could not have been very 
numerous on such a craft. Their food, of the 



38 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

roughest kind, was generally eaten uncooked. 
When the breeze was stiff behind, they need not 
row ; but they had to toil all day at the oar when 
the wind was not favorable. They were constantly 
wet in stormy weather. In winter, with beards 
hung with icicles or coated with rime, sleet on 
their eyebrows and hair, and ice covering their 
clothes and the boat side, their hardships were such 
as only the strongest men could endure. Neverthe- 
less, in the year of the Columbian Exposition at 
Chicago, in 1893, a party of hardy young Norwe- 
o^ians crossed the Atlantic in a craft built on the 
model of an ancient viking's ship. 

The Sao^as tell us that Leif found the coast seen 
by Bjarne far to the south of Greenland. The 
first landfall, which was probably Newfoundland, he 
named the Country of Slates, or of flat stones. The 
second, which was probably Nova Scotia, he called 
Woodland. Finally, he reached some part of the 
continent to the southwest, which might have 
been the valley of the Charles River, near Boston ; 
or, possibly, Rhode Island, which place he named 
Vineland, or Wine Land. 

Here he settled and spent the winter. On ac- 
count of the great number of wild grapes growing 
there, he gave the country its name. The Sagas 
go on to tell us about the grain, the grapes, and 
the fish, as well as about the natives, who do not 



NORSEMEN DASH OUT INTO THE DEEP SEA. 39 

seem to have been very friendly. These " Skral- 
hgs " were probably not Eskimos, but red Indians. 

In the springtime, when the days began to be 
long, and the great features of the sky and land- 
marks could be easily distinguished, Leif made his 
voyage homeward. On the way he was able to 
rescue fifteen men from shipwreck, and so was 
called Leif the Lucky. When his father died in 
Greenland, he became the chief of the colony, and 
lived until a.d. 1021. 

Leif had a brother named Thorvald. This man 
started off in a single ship, and with his people 
lived three winters in Vineland, making explorations 
meanwhile south and north. From first to last 
women have had a great deal to do with the mak- 
ing of America. It was a Norse woman who now 
proposed a colony in Vineland, instead of a camp. 
In the year 1006 a Norwegian named Thorfinn 
arrived in Greenland. He married a widow named 
Gudrid, and she induced him to sail with his ships 
to Vineland, and make permanent dwelling there. 
They took with them cattle and other things nec- 
essary for their homes. During the first winter, 
which was very severe, a son was born of the couple 
and named Snorre. From this child, who first 
saw light in the yet unnamed America, the great 
Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen claimed descent. In 
the springtime they moved to the spot where Leif 



40 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Erikson had spent the winter. After three years 
Thorfinn, with part of his colonists, returned to 
Greenland. 

After that, trading voyages were common be- 
tween Greenland and Vineland. The ships brought 
timber to Greenland, where it was very much needed 
for the building of Christian churches. One of 
the missionary bishops of Greenland, Erik Upsi, 
went to Vineland in 1121. The accounts in the 
Sagas of the voyagers are very full of detail, but are 
not of the kind that we should like to have, so as to 
prove absolutely that the Norsemen really occupied 
a part of what is now the United States. 

These men were hardy sailors, but not scholars, 
prophets, or scientific men. They tell of killing 
bears, of finding eggs when they were hungry, of 
burying their chief who was slain in battle, of a 
rock shaped like a ship's keel, of broad and flat- 
faced natives who wanted to sell furs, of the beaches 
where they hauled up their ships, and of the strong 
tides and currents, — just the things that do most 
interest sailors. We even learn what articles of 
commerce they sought and carried away. 

Voyages to Vineland continued until that awful 
event in the history of Norway which broke the 
spirit of the Norsemen, and made them the quiet 
and unadventurous people which they continued to 
be from the time of Columbus until the modern 



NORSEMEN DASH OUT INTO THE DEEP SEA. 4 1 

revival of marine enterprise under Nordenskjold, 
who found the Northeast Passage, and sailed over 
the north of Asia to Japan in 1879, and Nansen, 
who, in 1895, nearly reached the North Pole. The 
event which stopped further exploration and com- 
merce with America was the awful plague called 
the Black Death. It broke out at the beQ:inninQ^ 
of the second quarter of the fourteenth century, and 
until A.D. 1350 ravaged the country, depopulating 
the valleys and seacoasts, and sweeping off one 
third of the nation. The last record of a Norse 
ship that went to Vineland after timber is of a.d. 
1347. From that time forth a great fog, such as 
blots out the sight of sky and land from the sailor, 
falls upon history, and we see no more of the hardy 
Norsemen in North American waters. 

It is yet uncertain whether the Norsemen dis- 
covered America precisely as their friends and 
admirers, led by Professor Eben Horsford, think 
they did. We cannot tell exactly where the Norse- 
men had their settlement, although the Sagas seem 
reasonably clear on the general subject. Iceland's 
oldest historian, Ari, as early as 1130, speaks of the 
discovery of Vineland. He got his information 
from his uncle, who, when a boy, had lived in 
Greenland. There he learned about the discov- 
eries from an old man, who had himself accom- 
panied Erik the Red from Iceland in 986, and had 



42 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

seen Leif Erikson when he came back from Vine- 
land. From Ari the Wise came the later accounts 
of the discovery of Vineland. One account was 
got by a bishop from a peasant on Flatty Island, 
off the west coast of Iceland, and in the fourteenth 
century this islander's story was put into writing. 

Whether Columbus learned about America from 
the Scandinavian sailors whom he must have met 
at the ports, or from Norse books and writings, we 
cannot tell ; but this we do know : 

(i) That the Pope and other foreign potentates 
in the thirteenth century sought the friendship of 
Haakon, King of Norway, " in view of his power 
and experience on the sea." 

(2) That Adam of Bremen, writing late in the 
eleventh century, makes distinct mention of the 
regions which had been discovered by the Norse- 
men. After describing Iceland and Greenland, he 
tells us that the nephew of Canute the Great " men- 
tioned another land which had been discovered in 
this ocean [the Atlantic] which is called Vineland, 
because the vine producing excellent wine grows 
there spontaneously, and corn grows there abun- 
dantly without being sown. This we know not 
from fabulous conjecture, but from positive state- 
ments of the Danes." It may have been that 
Columbus saw this book, which was written in Latin 
and circulated throughout Europe. Columbus vis- 



NORSEMEN DASH OUT INTO THE DEEP SEA. 43 

ited Iceland in February, 1477, and could easily have 
heard about the lands discovered by Leif Erikson. 

(3) That Gudrid, the widow of Thorfinn, after her 
return to Norway, made a pilgrimage to Rome, where 
she was well received. It would be strange indeed 
if her tonsfue had been silent about her wonderful 
experiences. 

Many still believe it was in the region back of 
Boston and in the basin of the -Charles River that 
the Norsemen lived, traded and fought the Skral- 
liors or savage natives, and that the traditional and 
almost mythical city of Norumbega lay there. In- 
deed, my friend, the late Professor Eben Horsford, 
was so confident that this was the place described 
in the SaQ-as that he bouoht several acres of land 
near Maiden, Mass., and there erected a memorial 
to the Norse discoverers. This is a handsome 
tower of boulders and pebbles, having upon its 
front a polished granite tablet giving a translation 
of the passages from the Sagas which show what 
the Norsemen collected and exported. These were 
Masur-wood, or burls, fish, furs, and agricultural 
products. He thought that the name Norumbega 
was only the Indian's corruption of Norveger 
(Norway). Near Watertown, Professor Horsford 
believed he found docks, dams, walls, basins, ter- 
raced places of assembly, and at Maiden, a fort. 
Whatever we may believe, it is certain that the 



44 THE ROMANCE OE DISCOVERY. 

Norsemen were the pathfinders for Columbus and 
the pioneers of later discoveries. Before their time, 
all the other peoples of Europe practised naviga- 
tion only by moving along the shore with land- 
marks in view. The idea of striking out into 
the unmarked and pathless ocean, and through the 
imagined " sea of darkness," was unknown to the 
more southern European peoples, and it was never 
attempted by them until after the Northmen had 
done it. On the contrary, the Norwegians, who 
probably invented, or re-invented the keel, struck 
boldly out of sight of land with nothing but the 
great lights of heaven to guide, and with only the 
ravens for their pilots — even as these had helped 
Elijah and directed Noah before their time. Thus 
as perfectly as in a mathematical demonstration, 
they proved the possibility of navigating the deep 
and unmarked ocean. It is not likely that in the 
future progress of research, the modest honors of 
the Norsemen, in the history of discovery, will ever 
be taken from them. 



CHAPTER V. 

HOW THE JAPANESE HELPED TO DISCOVER AMERICA. 

WE think it a great thing that between the 
Norsemen, Columbus, Cabot, and Amerigo 
Vespucci, America was discovered ; but it was 
almost as wonderful that the old world itself was 
found out. It required many hundreds of years to 
learn the boundaries and form of the old world of 
Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. 

While the Norsemen were rowing their galleys 
about the coasts of northern and southern Europe, 
and even driving their keels westward in deep-sea 
navigation, those Asiatic Norsemen, the Japanese, 
were finding out their far eastern world. They 
were brave men, not afraid to leave the shore. 
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their 
sailors roamed southward into the Riu Kiu archi- 
pelago and to, Formosa, which they conquered. At 
the same time their daring pirates and navigators 
were scouring the seas and coasts north, south, 
and west. Landing in Tartary, Korea, and China, 
these Oriental brown men struck the same terror 
among the peoples of these countries as the Occi- 

45 



46 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

dental blonds did among Europeans. To this 
day, the name and the dread of the Japanese are 
upon all the coast peoples from Kamtchatka to 
Siam and the Philippines. The mothers of Chi- 
nese and Korean children still scare their naughty 
boys and girls by the name of the "Wo-jin," or 
Japanese. In the course of centuries, especially 
during that very long peace, in Tycoon times, 
from the days of the Pilgrims to those of Commo- 
dore Perry, these exploits of the ancient and medi- 
ceval Japanese buccaneers and raiders became fairy 
tales, like that of "Jack the Giant-Killer." This 
folk-lore is still told not only in Japanese, but 
in other languages, though with many a curious 
variation. 

The Japanese had something to do not only with 
the discovery of America, but also with the populat- 
ing and making of it. Ages ago they noticed the 
dark blue river of warm water flowing northward in 
the ocean's mass, and they named it Kuro Shiwo 
or the Black Stream. Into this indigo-blue current, 
during centuries upon centuries, Japanese fishermen 
and sailors, often with their wives and. children, have 
been caught in storms and driven out to sea. Help- 
less in the Black Stream, they have drifted along, 
often to lingering death by thirst or starvation, but 
often also to new life in a new world. Landing on 
the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, British America or 



HOW JAPANESE HELPED DISCOVER AMERICA. 47 

California, they have intermixed with the natives 
and their names have been lost, though many of 
their words survive. 

All this is a matter not of mere guess, but of 
Japanese tradition and history, and the actual rec- 
ord of hundreds of cases. Many of those picked 
up at sea, thousands of miles from Japan, I have 
known personally. Japanese coins and other ob- 
jects have been often found at many points along 
the Pacific American coast. Not a few Japanese 
words are easily recognized in the speech of the 
northwestern coast Indians. Without any doubt, 
a notable part of the population of North America 
has come from that Japanese archipelago which, 
since 1894, extends from the Philippines to Kamt- 
chatka. Every year in our century, Japanese and 
other waifs, living or dead, have been noted or 
rescued at sea. In the days before general Euro- 
pean navigation, they drifted helplessly to ruin or 
were stranded on the coast which curves all the 
way round from Nippon to Mexico. 

It is remarkable that both the great ocean cur- 
rents were discovered by Americans. Dr. Benjamin 
Franklin, in crossing the Atlantic, noticed the seam 
between the warm and cold water and the difference 
in color, and called the attention of the sailors to 
it. The Pacific Stream, the Black Current of the 
Japanese, was first discovered, that is, scientifically 



48 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

studied, located, explained, and mapped by a brill- 
iant American naval officer, Captain Silas Bent, who 
visited Japan with Captain Glynn in 1850, and with 
Commodore M. C. Perry in 1853-54. 

There have been some who think that the Chi- 
nese also knew about America, but the book about 
Fu-san, or Fusang, is probably nothing more than 
a description by some Chinese traveller of Fu-san 
in Korea, and does not concern America. Never- 
theless, it is quite probable that not a few Chinese 
sailors have drifted up to Kuro Shivvo, and landed 
on the shores of America. For ages the Japanese 
have had notions, such as we find in romances and 
fairy tales, about Fusang (or Fuso) and Horai, which 
might have been in America, if anywhere. Many 
other myths, such as the Amazon's country, or island 
inhabited only by women, the philosopher's stone, 
the elixir of life, and various sorts of Utopias, were 
common in the Mikado's empire. No Japanese or 
Chinese ever " discovered " America in any other 
way than that of Madoc, the Welshman, that is, in 
imagination, or by the pure guesswork of later glori- 
fiers. By a true discoverer, we mean one who not 
only finds unknown land, but tells, writes, or sends 
back word about his discovery. 

In another way than by helping to populate its 
shores, the Japanese contributed very efficiently to 
the historic discovery of America, in 1492. We 



HO IF JAPANESE HELPED DISCO VER AMERICA. 49 

are learning more and more to look into all the 
causes of a great event or movement, such as the 
revelation of a new world. We know that a good 
deal more than the dream of Columbus, or the favor 
or disfavor of a Spanish king and queen, was be- 
hind the discovery of this continent. 

One must know the history of the world in order 
to understand that of the United States. The coast- 
line of Africa was first explored and the new water 
route eastward to India found by the Portuguese. 
Then came the thought of sailing westward to get 
to India on the other side. All the first discoverers 
of America were Italians, — Columbus, the Cabots, 
Vespucci, Verrazano, and Fray Marcus. Why and 
how did Portugal lead the world in discovery .f* 
And why did Italy follow so soon after .^ 

It was because the eastern routes by sea and land, 
over the Mediterranean and by caravans, were shut 
up, completely stopping all trade. 

Who shut them ? We answer, first the Saracens 
in North Africa, and then the Turks in Constanti- 
nople. 

Yet, what moved the Turks westward from their 
old ancestral seats around the Caspian Sea, causing 
them to advance to the west upon Syria, Constanti- 
nople, and the old Byzantine Empire, and into 
Egypt } The Saracens had, centuries before, over- 
flowed North Africa, and even occupied much of 



50 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Spain and Portugal, but the Turks completely 
blocked the only remaining routes north and south 
to the Indies. What led or drove the Turks into 
their western movement, making them press upon 
Europe ? 

To this we answer. It was the Mongols, and the 
Mongols were very probably led by a Japanese. 

The story is a very simple one. By the twelfth 
century, after several hundred years of fighting, all 
the tribes and peoples in the Japanese Islands had 
been conquered and brought under the sway of that 
conquering tribe from the Asian Highlands, which 
had discovered, explored, and colonized Japan, and 
pacified its savages or " Indians." The head of this 
tribe was the Mikado (a title meaning Holy Gate or 
Sublime Porte), a religious as well as a political chief, 
who, at Kioto, combined Church and State in his 
person just as the Sultan does in Constantinople. 
After the wars of exploration and conquest had 
ceased and peace had come, the two great, noble 
families, the Heiki and the Genji, or the Whites and 
the Reds, quarrelled. Then they broke into a feud 
which later kindled the flames of strife throughout 
the whole empire. It was like the civil War of the 
Roses in England. At first, the Heiki were success- 
ful and killed or banished the Genji leaders. 

In 1 1 59 Tokiwa, the beautiful concubine of the 
Genji leader, fled with her three children, not know- 



HOW JAPANESE HELPED DISCOVER AMERICA. 51 

ing where her future food and shelter were to be. 
One of her children was a babe at the breast. Capt- 
ured by her lord's enemy, she saved her own life 
and that of her children by entering the harem of 
her conqueror. To make a long and fascinating 
story short, one of her sons grew up to be the 
mighty leader, Yoritomo. Another, the babe, be- 
came Yoshitsune, the field-marshal, who annihilated 
the Heiki, after several campaigns, from 1180-85, 
finishing with a great naval battle at Shimonoseki 
(where the treaty between Japan and China was 
signed in May, 1895). This son of Tokiwa was 
the most brilliant of all Japan's mediaeval generals. 
When the people declared that the glory of the 
victories was due to Yoshitsune, his older brother, 
Yoritomo the Tycoon, now that he had exhausted 
the benefit of his younger brother's service, became 
bitterly jealous of him. The spark was fanned to 
flames by a slanderer. The older persecuted his 
younger brother and finally ordered his death. 
Yoshitsune fled northward to the island of Yezo 
and thence escaped to Tartary. In Chinese pro- 
nunciation his name was Genghi Khe. There are 
good arguments for thinking that it was this 
Japanese field-marshal who organized the Mongol 
tribes into that mighty host, which poured victori- 
ous out of their northern highlands upon the warm, 
rich lands of China. The Mongols conquered the 



52 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

great Chinese world, which included the Middle 
Kingdom and many vassal nations. Then this 
great cavalry leader, now known as Genghis Khan, 
whose genius both for war and peace resembled that 
of Napoleon, swept westward with his irresistible 
horsemen. He died in 1227; but under his suc- 
cessors the Mongol empire spread westward until 
it touched the Caspian Sea. 

In the succeeding generations, the son and grand- 
sons of Genghis continued his work of conquest, and 
their realm covered almost all Asia from Korea to 
Syria, as well as large portions of Russia. This 
invasion of the Mongols, even greater than those 
of their ancestors from the steppes, the Scythians 
and Huns, caused the establishment of many dy- 
nasties famous in history. It stirred up all Asiatic 
humanity to a movement westward, even as the mis- 
sionary wars of Mahomet had forced them north- 
ward and the North Africans westward. The 
Turkomans and the various tribes of Turks were 
pushed and excited to action by the Mongols. 
Later, one branch of the great clan penetrated 
India, and is known in history as the line of the 
Mogul emperors whose splendid empire began in 
the fifteenth century. 

Almost all the rulers of nations in Asia, except 
in Arabia and the purely Turkish dominions, be- 
came vassals of Khublai Khan, the grandson of 



HOW JAPANESE HELPED DISCOVER AMERICA. 53 

Genghis Khan. The Mongols even entered Europe, 
occupying for several generations large parts of 
Russia. These men from China, aided by the 
Arabs, brought with them not only the Chinese 
myths and notions of alchemy, magic, and fancy, 
but also Chinese arts and inventions, the magnetic 
needle, wall-paper, gunpowder, and printing, which 
spread westward. The old-world myths and fairy 
tales had almost as much influence on the romance 
and fact of the discovery and exploration of America 
as did the realities of compasses, globes, and maps, 
as we shall see. The mariner s compass — long 
known in China, and whose use in a voyage from 
Nankin to Korea in a.d. 1122 is recorded — came 
into Italy by the sea-route. 

While the Mongols were in power, laws were 
modified, literature and public works flourished, and 
order was maintained over all Asia. Good roads 
were kept open and a general spirit of toleration 
prevailed. The Nestorian Christians entered the 
Chinese empire in welcome. They converted the 
royal family of a Tartar tribe, living near Lake 
Baikal in Mongolia, where now Russian steamers 
ply and the Siberian railway passes. Noticing the 
similarity in sound of the Tartar chief's title, 
" Owang Khan," to the Hebrew Cohen or Kahna, 
priest, and Johann, John, the Europeans called him 
Prester John, that is. Priest John. This famous 



54 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

character, who in 1 202 became the vassal of Genghis 
Khan, issued letters to the Pope and Kings of France 
and Portugal. He long survived, in western poetry 
and legend, as the priestly ruler of an earthly para- 
dise. The legend of Prester John powerfully in- 
fluenced the Spanish friars in America, who hoped 
to find some such prince and convert him to the 
church. 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE OLD TRADE ROUTES TO THE EAST. 

WHILE the Franks, or the peoples in Europe 
which afterwards became nations, — ItaHan, 
German, French, Spanish, — were developing their 
history during the middle ages, Arabia was consid- 
ered the land of spices. This was not because these 
aromatic plants grew there, but because in the Ara- 
bian ports were the markets to which the spices of 
India and the Malay archipelago were brought. 
The Arabs, as we know from their own geogra- 
phers, traded in the far East not only with China, 
but even with Korea. In Spain, with their univer- 
sities, learned men, books, libraries, and science, the 
Saracens taught much to the Christian nations, then 
only partially risen out of their semibarbarism. In 
time, Moorish Spain became the centre of science 
in Europe. 

From the ninth to the fifteenth century the 
Europeans knew little about the world, except what 
the learned men could gather from the ancient 
authors, Strabo and Ptolemy. Much of their 

55 



56 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

knowledge of countries, and even their idea of the 
roundness of the earth, was obtained from the old 
Greeks through Arabic translations. During the 
Renaissance, or rebirth of knowledge, art, and lit- 
erature in the fifteenth century, the ancient Latin 
and Greek authors were eagerly read. This discov- 
ery of the ancient world of books, statues, coins, and 
ideas was almost as wonderful as the finding out of 
a new continent. As Moorish Spain had led in 
science, so Italy was pioneer in literature and phi- 
losophy, thus powerfully influencing all the nations 
in this awakening of curiosity to know about the 
world. Of the Italian cities, Pisa and Florence 
became centres of art and science, while Venice 
and Genoa excelled in Oriental commerce. 

For over half a century there was much com- 
merce between Venice and Genoa and the Mogul 
and Chinese empires, or India and Cathay. The 
Italian merchants used to bring from Asia, silks, 
cashmeres, muslins, dyewood, perfumes, spices, gold, 
precious stones, and pearls. They used to boast 
that no one in Europe could spice wine or season 
meat without helping to enrich one of these Italian 
cities. Their fleets traded directly with every mari- 
time country in Europe, as well as with the near 
and the far East. 

A great many arts and sciences have arisen out 
of the need of men to fill their stomachs and please 



THE OLD TRADE ROUTES TO THE EAST. 57 

their appetites. In our day, we raise a variety of 
fruits and garden vegetables at home, and import 
eatables of all sorts from many countries, which our 
ancestors did not have ; but we, too, enjoy spices for 
the flavor they give. Formerly, spices grew only in 
the far East. Now they are produced in all hot 
countries, and we have introduced many of the 
Oriental fruits and plants in our gardens. Until 
within a century or two, however, most people in 
Europe had to live chiefly on salt or fresh meat and 
fish and grain, with little in the way of salads or 
esculents, and in winter, their diet was especially 
restricted. So they enjoyed all the more the fla- 
vors of the aromatic nuts, seeds, rinds, barks, roots, 
and dried fruits used in cookery, or ground fine to 
sift on choice dishes. At dinner, a seat near the 
spice-box was the seat of honor. The very word 
"spice," from "specie," means kind; that is, the kind 
of delicacy, just as " specie " means, not paper, but 
the right kind of, money. Cloves, ginger, allspice, 
nutmeg, cardamon, pepper, mace, capsicum, cinna- 
mon, cassia, and vanilla were all in demand. Many 
others, with names too hard to pronounce, were 
also imported at high prices. Of not a few of these 
spicy or piquant barks, herbs, or nuts thus imported 
at great expense, it was believed that they would 
heal man's aches, pains, and diseases, or keep them 
off. It was for the Oriental spices, even more than 



58 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

for silk and gold, that the southern Europeans were 
so eager to trade with the infidels further south and 
east. 

The Genoese usually took the northern route by 
way of Constantinople and the Black Sea. They 
loaded their ships with goods brought either from 
the Caspian Sea region and China by caravan, or 
from India through the valley of the Euphrates, the 
Tigris, and the Persian Gulf. The traffic was partly 
by camels overland, and partly by river boats and 
sea-going ships. Thus India, China, and the 
Malay archipelago, full of spice islands, poured 
their wealth into sunny Italy, which grew rich 
and cultured, and finally became the bestower of 
light, science, wealth, and comfort upon all Europe, 
besides being the mother of the discoverers of 
America. 

At this time Italy was divided into many power- 
ful municipal republics, — Venice, Genoa, Pisa, 
Florence. The Venetians had not only a great rich 
city built upon piles in the lagoons of the Adri- 
atic Sea, but also many neighboring and subject 
lands which ministered to their glory, fame, and 
wealth. The symbol of Venice was the lion of 
St. Mark, who was her patron saint. Her ships 
sent after Arabian goods took the southern route 
and sailed to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, 
where caravans from Cairo met them. By this 



THE OLD TRADE ROUTES TO THE EAST. 59 

means, the Venetians had a longer water route than 
the Genoese, but one that required constant skill to 
navigate, and not a little military force and fighting 
to keep open. In time, it got to be quite common 
for Italian travellers and merchants to visit Arabia 
and go to Mecca. Besides her trade, Venice had 
famous manufactories. Here were made most of 
the beads and many of the glass and metal trinkets 
used later in the traffic with the Africans and 
Americans. One gentleman, now living in the 
Mohawk valley, has duplicated in Venice shops or 
museums every pattern of the beads, which he 
found by the hundreds, in the Iroquois Indian 
graves in New York. 

The Venetians and the Mongols got along very 
well together. Princes, envoys, and merchants 
from Europe visited the court of the Great Khan, 
and Italian artists and decorators in India helped 
to build and beautify the mosques and minarets 
and tombs of Mogul India ; perhaps even the Taj 
Mahal. 

Among other travellers in the far East, who 
heard also of Japan, were Matteo and Nicolo Polo, 
who made two overland journeys from Italy to 
China. On their second journey, in 1271, they 
carried letters from Pope Gregory X. to the 
Chinese Emperor, who was then a Mongol, and 
called the Great Cham, or Khan. With , them 



6o THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

went Marco Polo, who spent many years as an 
officer in the service of the Khan, visiting Tibet, 
Persia, and southern China. For three years he 
was governor of a large city. These Venetians in 
the Chinese empire used the paper money and 
passports then in common use, and saw the Grand 
Canal, which, though dug long before, had been 
greatly improved by the Khan. They heard stories 
of Japan and of its gilded roofs, gold-plated pagodas 
and temples, of which the columns and water-gutters 
under the eaves were of gold. 

Centuries afterward, when living in Japan, I my- 
self saw castle towers tipped with golden-scaled 
bronze dolphins which flashed high in the air, and 
temple roofs with heavy and wide eaves-troughs 
made of solid gold, which were set to catch the 
sacred droppings of the rain from heaven. I saw 
also viroin ©"old coins as bis: as a man's extended 
hand, besides temple pillars and ceilings and for- 
ests of idols covered with gold-leaf. 

When the mighty Mongol Armada was in prep- 
aration to sail on its vain attempt to conquer 
Japan, the Polos taught the Mongols how to make 
catapults and other European engines of war. 

These Venetians were in Cathay, or the Chinese 
empire, over twenty years. They then returned by 
way of Persia, arriving in Italy in 1295. When 
Marco Polo wrote his wonderful book, telling of 



THE OLD TRADE ROUTES TO THE EAST. 6 1 

the marvellous curiosities of China, and about the 
brave Japanese who fought the Mongol Armada, 
and cut off the heads of the great Khan's mes- 
sengers, he was laughed at. He spelled and pro- 
nounced the Chinese name, Shi-pen-kok (meaning 
Sun-root Land, or Kingdom of the Rising Sun) 
as Cipango or Zipangu, and China (Katai) as 
Cathay. His book was at first branded as a mass 
of falsehoods, and in derision he was called " Signor 
Milliano," or " Lord Millions," because he used the 
word " million " so often. Gradually, his story was 
found to be true. 

There is little doubt but that Columbus read 
Polo's book a great deal, and thought much about 
what he had said concerning Cathay, or China, and 
Zipangu, or Japan. Franciscan friars also visited 
China, and Christian churches were begun in sev- 
eral Chinese cities. Embassies from the Pope and 
the Khan exchanged courtesies at Avignon and 
Peking. Cathay and Cambaluc (China and Peking) 
became well known in Europe. Italian merchants, 
doctors, and priests travelled and lived in Chinese 
cities ; and, on the other hand, Chinese engineers 
and physicians won fame in Persia. 

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century was 
the golden age of Italian commerce with the East, 
when gems, rich silks, gold and silver, jewelled 
arms and armor, statues, pictures, and palaces were 



62 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

more plentiful in Italy than anywhere else in 
Europe. The Venice of our century is only a 
shadow of its former greatness. As long as the 
Eastern trade continued, Columbus was not likely 
to go to the poor West, or to Spain ; nor w^as any 
new world toward the sunset likely to be discov- 
ered. 

But suddenly (as it seems in history, though in 
reality, gradually) the trade routes were blocked, 
commerce ceased, and Italy became poor. Why? 
we ask, and the answer is, Because of tremendous 
political changes in Asia, but chiefly on account of 
Mahometan bigotry. 

In Asia, with the one exception of Japan (which 
has the lousiest continuous line of rulers in the 
world), dynasties do not last long, and political 
structures are not permanent. The great Mongol 
empire, after scarcely more than a century of life, 
was broken into fragments. In 1368, the Chinese 
rebelled against their Mongol rulers and set up 
the Mings, a native line of emperors ; but Confu- 
cianism became more narrow and severe. Many 
of the nations once under the great Mongol 
Khan were converted from gentle and tolerant 
Buddhism to intolerant Islam, which teaches that 
men of other faiths should be put to the 
sword. 

The empire of Timour rose in Central Asia, and 



THE OLD TRADE ROUTES TO THE EAST. 63 

between the years 1360 and 1405 Timour con- 
quered most of western Asia, including Syria and 
Asia Minor, invaded Russia to Moscow, defeated 
the Turks in battle, and forced other nations to 
acknowledge his power. But when Timour died of 
ague in 1405, the Turks were left free to press their 
conquest of the Greek Christian empire, and to ad- 
vance on Constantinople. 

The Saracens had long held Spain and Portugal, 
Egypt and North Africa; but while Christian valor 
was driving the Mahometans out of Europe, other 
influences were at work to usher in a new era of 
knowledge about the earth on which men lived, and 
which some thinkers suspected was a round planet. 
In this century, also, wood-engraving, printing, 
paper, the rousing of energies by the fierceness of 
the Turks, and the cutting off of old luxuries and 
supplies, stirred and widened the thoughts of men, 
compelled new enterprises, and paved the way for 
the discovery of America. The introduction and 
improvement of the mariner's compass, and the 
invention of the astrolabe, or star-catcher, for tak- 
ing the position of the heavenly bodies, greatly 
aided navigation. 

One of the first countries to explore the sea for 
new trade routes, to attempt to reopen traffic with 
the Orient, to set out in quest of new lands, and, if 
possible, of Christian friends, to begin the mighty 



64 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

work of uniting the nations of the earth, and to 
make the explorations and settlements which the 
Dutch first, and the English afterwards, confiscated 
and appropriated, was little Portugal. To this 
country let us now look. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PORTUGAL FOUNDS A TRAINING SCHOOL OF DIS- 
COVERERS. 

DOWN in the southwest corner of Europe is a 
country now very much impoverished, often 
made miserable by earthquakes, and kept poor by 
superstition and the ignorance of its people. It 
forms part of that Iberian peninsula which is shut 
off by mountains and the sea from the rest of 
Europe. Having plenty of rivers, the country is 
like a great vineyard, for here is the climate in 
which grapes grow luxuriantly. Instead of the 
northern butter and beer, there is plenty of oil and 
w^ine. Oporto gives its name both to its rich and 
heavy port wine, and to the kingdom itself. In 
ancient times this city was named Cale, and the 
Latin w^ords " Portus Cale," meaning the port or 
gate to Cale, have become Portugal. Anciently the 
country was called Lusitania. 

Although to-day poor, unrenowned, and one of 

the lowest among the Powers of Europe, Portugal 

was once a great nation. Here were first kindled 

the bright beacon lights of modern discovery. In 

F 65 



66 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the fifteenth century, the people of this kingdom led 
in the making of modern geography. Best of all, 
Portugal was pioneer in the growing federation of 
nations which already exists under international 
law, and which is yet to culminate in that unity of 
the world which is implied in Christianity. 

One feature that greatly influenced the maritime 
and colonial polity of Portugal, was the peculiar 
sentiment and national tone produced by its long 
warfare against Mahometanism. In a.d. 711, Tarik 
landed on the coast, and the Saracen occupied parts 
of the Iberian peninsula for five or six hundred 
years. The splendid Moorish cities, palaces, and 
gateways, still remaining in Spain, date from this 
era. When the Christians began to lift their heads 
and drive back the Saracens, Portugal was one of 
the first Christian kingdoms formed. This fight for 
life continued during several hundred years. It was 
one of religion, of race, and of civilization for the 
Fatherland. The Moors fought the duel bravely, 
and were only driven away, inch by inch, from the 
soil of the Iberian peninsula. We ought to excuse, 
or at least be ready to explain, much of the peculiar 
religious bigotry of the Spaniards and Portuguese of 
early days, because of their long struggle for life and 
faith against equally bigoted Mahometans. 

It was because Prince Henry, born in 1394, 
nearly a century before Columbus' discovery, and 



PORTUGAL'S TRAINING SCHOOL OF DISCOVERERS. 6/ 

called The Navigator, sought to continue this war- 
fare of the cross against the crescent in every part 
of the world, that Portugal became the first naval 
academy in Europe, and trained up a line of dis- 
coverers. Prince Henry established, in 141 5, a 
school of navigation, in which noblemen were edu- 
cated, and the sailor's craft made honorable. He 
introduced the use of the astrolabe and the mas:- 
netic needle, or the mariner's compass. Set on 
gimbals in a box, with a card or face marked with 
thirty-two points, it was much improved over the 
Chinese original. From this school, issued that 
movement of maritime discovery and enterprise 
which placed Portugal in the van of European 
civilization. The coast-line of Africa was gradu- 
ally learned, the route to the Indies reopened, 
and Columbus stimulated to his discovery. 

On the 4th of March, 1894, all Portugal was 
ablaze with bunting and vocal with music, for the 
people were everywhere celebrating the five hun- 
dredth anniversary of the sailor prince who never left 
land, but who became the father of modern naviga- 
tion. His captains discovered Africa, and he in- 
spired Columbus. Through his influence, within 
a century one-half of the sflobe was discovered. 

Who was this Prince Henry, and how came his 
call from God to open the East and West } 

Henry was the son of King John (under whom 



6S THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Portugal first began to drive back the Moors) and 
of Philippa, daughter of " old John of Gaunt, time- 
honored Lancaster." Trained to war, he, like so 
many soldiers of that age, might have spent his life 
in fighting for this king or that, in any cause that 
paid him well. In 141 5 he went with his two 
brothers on an expedition against the Moorish 
rock-fortress and city of Ceuta in Morocco. So 
hard was the fighting and so gallant the bravery 
of the three princes, but especially of Henry, that 
in one day the place fell into the hands of the 
Christians. 

So splendid became the fame of Prince Henry 
that, all at once, the Pope, the Emperor, and the 
Kings of Castile and of England invited the youth- 
ful hero to take command of their armies. But, in- 
stead of more glory and war. Prince Henry suddenly 
became a student, and faced for twelve long years 
costly failure and disheartening ridicule; yet he 
ever kept on dreaming of new countries and finding 
new paths in the sea. This seemed a conversion 
almost as wonderful as that of St. Paul. What, or 
who caused it ? 

Let us look at Ceuta. The name is probably a 
corruption of the Roman Septas, or seven. It is a 
twin rock opposite Gibraltar, and was one of the 
Pillars of Hercules, marking the end of the earth 
at which the whole ancient world had written, " ne 



PORTUGAL'S TRAINING SCHOOL OF DISCOVERERS. 6g 

plus ultra " — no more beyond. It was Prince Henry 
who rubbed out that legend, and bade men seek 
further. 

To-day, in America, — sometimes called by en- 
vious Europeans, " the land of the almighty dollar," — 
those Pillars of Hercules survive in the sign for our 
unit of value. In the graphic device " $," we have 
a skeleton picture of the two Pillars of Hercules, 
of which Ceuta was one, with the tower flags or 
streamers in between, in the form of a letter S. 
The American silver dollar has replaced the old 
Spanish " pillar dollar," or " piece of eight," but the 
Q^host of it remains in our writinor. Whenever we 
use commercial arithmetic, we borrow the Arabic 
numerals brought by the Saracens, first from India 
and then from Arabia, into Spain, and for our dollar 
mark, we make a diagram of the two Pillars of Her- 
cules, the twin rocks of Gibraltar and Ceuta wuth 
the Christian flag of Spain flying where once the 
crescent banner waved. 

Ancient ideas shut up the world at Ceuta and 
Gibraltar, as the Philistines shut up Samson. Prince 
Henry, like the Hebrew giant, rose up out of sleep, 
and carrying the bars and gates away with him, 
opened that world, of which European people, from 
the Pope to the peasant, were then ignorant. 

Prince Henry found that some of his Moorish 
prisoners in Ceuta, instead of being horned devils. 



70 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

were polished gentlemen of noble rank, liberally edu- 
cated and well travelled. He treated them kindly. 
They in return told of the great continent of Africa 
where they lived; of the mountains, deserts, and 
oases ; of the city of Timbuctoo, with its ivory pal- 
ace and gilded roofs ; of the Niger River, of Guinea, 
of Mozambique and Zanzibar. Still further, they 
thrilled the young Christian prince, their captor, 
with stories of voyages to India, whence shiploads 
of pearls and rubies, gold and spices, came to enrich 
the Mahometans ; of the huge animals ; of amazing 
forests and fruits, and of the populous countries of 
the great continent over which blazed the Southern 
Cross amid starry skies. 

All this set Prince Henry's imagination on fire. 
"Africa for Christ" became his watchword — to be 
understood, of course, in his own way. He used 
his opportunity at once. He was grandmaster of 
the order of Christ, and had control of its vast reve- 
nues. He was governor for life of Algarve, the 
extreme southeastern province of Portugal and of 
Europe. At Sagres, down at the very tip of the 
kingdom and the continent, he founded an observa- 
tory, the first in Portugal. He devoted himself to 
the study of astronomy and mathematics. He sum- 
moned to his aid all the men skilled in navigation, 
or in making maps or instruments, of whom he 
could hear. He trained up young Portuguese naval 



PORTUGAL'S TRAINING SCHOOL OF DISCOVERERS, yi 

officers, who became fearless captains. In a decade, 
he had won away from Venice and Genoa the mo- 
nopoly of seamanship and natural science. 

Henry was not always successful at first, and the 
nobles ridiculed him, complained of him for wasting 
money, as they said; but he persevered. Soon his 
ships began to creep out along the African coast. 
The Azores, the Madeiras, the Canaries, and the 
Cape Verde Islands were first discovered, and then 
colonized ; so that, by a.d. 1420, they had become 
part of the kingdom. The song of the pretty yel- 
low canary birds was heard on the continent. The 
island groups became vineyards. In 1434, Cape 
Bojador was reached. In 1443, Gonsalvez came 
back with a bag of gold-dust and ten black men. 
This was the beoinnino: of the slave-trade to Eu- 
rope. These Africans were sent to be seen by the 
Pope, who at once gave Prince Henry a title deed 
of the country from Cape Bojador to the Indies, 
that is of all Africa. From this time, a little black 
boy is seen attending as page, or leading the horse 
of nearly every prince in Europe. 

Gradually the Portuguese captains became bolder. 
They drove their little ships down past Sierra 
Leone and along the grain, the gold, and the ivory 
coasts. Moving hundreds of miles toward the ris- 
ing sun, yet ever keeping within sight of land, in 
1440 they discovered Guinea. By 1446, fifty-one 



J 2 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

ships had visited Senegal. When the Turks were 
rushing into Constantinople, in 1453, the famous 
annalist, Azurara, wrote his chronicles of the dis- 
covery and conquest of Guinea. As he says in this 
wonderful book, "The Lord Prince (Henry) had 
five reasons for the discovery of foreign countries. 

" First, to. ascertain the truth about these regions, 
as it appeared to him that if he or some other lord 
did not attempt the discovery, no mariner or mer- 
chant would try the venture, as it is quite clear that 
such persons will navigate to places only where they 
can reap evident profits. 

" Second, he thought that perchance some Chris- 
tian country might be found, with which his friend- 
ship and commerce might be established. 

" The third reason was that he wanted to know 
the true extension of Mussulman's power, his born 
and sworn enemy. 

"The fourth reason was that during the thirty-one 
years that he had waged war against the Mussul- 
mans, he had never found a single Christian prince 
that would help him for the love of Jesus Christ, and 
he might find in the undiscovered world some Chris- 
tian power that would be his ally. 

" Fifth, the great desire of augmenting and in- 
creasing the faith in our true religion." 

With such motives, the highest that can animate 
man, and with others also, — making a mixture as 



PORTUGAL S TRAINING SCHOOL OF DISCOVERERS. 73 

in most men and nations, — Portugal nobly started 
on the career of exploration. Her ships kept ever 
moving to the southward along the edge of the 
dark continent. When Henry died, in 1460, eigh- 
teen hundred miles of new coast had been discovered 
and explored; Portugal was not only the centre of 
geographical interest and science, but also a magnet 
drawing to itself the Italian mariners, map-makers 
and scholars; and the good work, begun by Henry, 
kept on. 

The Guinea trade made Lisbon rich, and hither 
flocked the Italian merchants, geographers, and 
map-makers, whose occupation at home was gone, 
and who did not care about the petty wars then go- 
ing on in Italy. Here they talked about the round- 
ness of the earth, and the belief that it was a globe 
gained new adherents. Before 1470, Bartholomew, 
the brother of Christopher Columbus, established 
himself at the Portuguese capital to make maps of 
the new discoveries in Africa ; and there, sometime 
before 1473, Christopher Columbus joined him. In 
1477, Christopher made a voyage to Iceland, where 
he heard of the westward sea-travels of Leif Erik- 
son. 

When Captain Diaz started on a voyage to reach 
the vei*y southernmost end of Africa, Bartholomew 
Columbus joined him. They passed the mouth of 
the Congo River, — that gateway into a great divis- 



74 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

ion of Africa; and, in our day, associated with the 
names of Livingstone and Stanley, one of whom 
explored its cradle lands, and the other its course 
to the sea. 

It was, in i486, after fifty years of Portuguese 
enterprise, that Bartholomew Columbus, leaving his 
map-making, accompanied Captain Bartholomew 
Diaz, with whom, over five thousand miles from 
home, he reached the southern tip of Africa, which 
Diaz named the Cape of Storms. When they re- 
turned, the wise king, delighted with this logical 
result of Prince Henry's enlightened foresight, 
scratched out of the record in the log-book, " Cape 
of Storms," and wrote in its place a name which 
proved a prophecy, — "Cape of Good Hope"; for, 
with the eyes of faith, he already saw the all-sea 
route opened to the Indies. Prince Henry was 
vindicated. The next Portuguese fleet, with Afri- 
can pilots, sailed straight to India. 

When Bartholomew Columbus told his brother 
what he had seen, Christopher was, more than ever, 
satisfied that the earth was round, and that by sail- 
ing west he could reach Japan, which, he thought, 
projected far out toward Europe. Meanwhile, the 
future world-giver kept on trying to persuade the 
King of Spain; but in order to "have two strings 
to his bow," he sent his brother Bartholomew to 
England to interest King Henry VII. in the idea 



PORTUGAL'S TRAINING SCHOOL OF DISCOVERERS. 75 

of getting to Japan by the back door. Henry was 
slow in making up his mind, and by the time Bar- 
tholomew reached France, he heard of his brother 
Christopher's return homeward. 

We must not forget that all this was before 
Columbus discovered some islands and parts of a 
continent that he never knew^ belonged to a new 
world. It was Prince Henry's and King John's 
naval and colonizing policy that prepared the way 
for the success of Columbus. It was because 
Portugal discovered the old world first, that the 
Genoese thought of, and was encouraged to find, 
the new one. On the German Behaim's globe, 
made in 1487, the Portuguese flag is marked on 
so many coasts, countries, and islands that it seems 
as if the only European country then likely to pos- 
sess the earth was little Portugal. Even Siam and 
the Golden Chersonese, or Malay peninsula, are so 
marked. Japan looms largely, but no continent 
appears between Europe and Asia. 

The King of Portugal kept on encouraging his 
brave navigators. When he died, his successor, 
Manoel, fitted out an expedition under Vasco da 
Gama, a gentleman in the king's household, who 
in 1497 reached India by an all-sea passage, and 
then bravely continued in his little ship the cir- 
cumnavigation of the globe. 

This first furrow round the world ploughed by 



j6 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

a ship's keel was followed by another made by the 
Portuguese Cabral, who in 1500 started out with 
eighteen ships, expecting* to reach Farther India 
where the spices grew, by following the route 
opened by da Gama. Obeying his instructions, he 
kept far out in the Atlantic, and, being driven still 
further by storms, came in sight of Brazil by acci- 
dent. He explored the coast, and took possession 
of it. He then visited East Africa, Calcutta, and 
Cochin China, reaching Lisbon July 23, 1501, with 
an amazingly rich cargo of spices, which in those 
days were often worth their weight in gold. 

Vasco da Gama's second voyage was made with 
twenty ships, in 1502-3; but no one circumnavi- 
gated the globe again until 15 19, when the feat 
was repeated by Magellan, a Portuguese, who had 
been in the East Indies. Like so many others, he 
considered America a barrier to the far East ; but 
knowing that Balboa had found an ocean behind it, 
Magellan hoped to sail around the obstruction, and 
thus get to the lands of spice, gold, silk, and gems. 

Yet this squadron left Europe under Spanish 
auspices, Magellan having quarrelled with the Por- 
tuguese Court, which he thought had treated him 
meanly. Crossing the Atlantic, he passed through 
the strait, which he named after himself. It was 
a long while, however, before this watercourse 
was used as a practical highway. Nevertheless, 



PORTUGAL'S TRAINING SCHOOL OF TISCOVERERS. J'J 

Magellan's voyage and discovery gave to the world 
its first distinct knowledge of the Pacific. Soon 
afterwards, the Spanish di'scovery of the Philippines 
led to their colonization and the development of 
a rich commerce through Mexico to the Asiatic 
islands. 

Even North American waters mirrored the flag of 
Lusitania. In 1500 Caspar Cortereal ploughed the 
Atlantic, reaching the high latitudes of America, and 
finding amazing sea-w^ealth. Kidnapping some of 
the people, probably red Indians, he brought them 
home, and told also of the new-found fisheries. 
King Emanuel thought more of the promising re- 
sources of labor that would require no wages than 
of the fisheries. So he named this new slave-coast 
Terra de Labrador, or Land of Laborers, which 
name it still keeps. 

No one can omit Portugal from the romance of 
discovery, or when telling the story of the finding 
of America, and of its size and shape. From far 
Formosa which the Portuguese named, and from 
Japan which a Portuguese, Mendez Pinto, was the 
first to enter and describe from sight, to Labrador, 
Portugal has a noble record of discovery. 

If, at times, we are tempted to look with con- 
tempt upon little Portugal, because of her smallness 
and weakness, and to despise the country because 
of prevalent bigotry and ignorance, and her ap- 



78 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

proval of the slave-trade in Africa, we must not 
forget her history. It is a great fact that the 
Portuguese discovered the African continent, and 
opened Asia; and this they did without undue vio- 
lence. Portugal, with the grandest of all motives 
that can move mankind to action, — the motive of 
religion, — bore the almighty spirit of civilization 
round this orb to awaken slumbering races and 
resuscitate dead nations. It was Portugal that 
brought separate communities together, and began 
the assimilation of mankind to mankind. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ITALY, THE HOME OF COMMERCE AND EXPLORATION. 

ITALY, by its shape and situation in the middle 
' of southern Europe, very close to Africa, and 
not far from Asia, — a peninsula with many harbors, 
— was fitted from the first to be a land of ships and 
sailors, and the home of conquerors. Shaped like 
a boot, with a strong leg and unwearied foot inside 
of it, Italy seems to walk upon the sea. 

Japan boasts herself as " the country within the 
four seas," but Italy and her islands are washed by 
five seas, — the Ligurian, the Tyrrene, the African, 
the Ionian, and the Adriatic, — all of them famous for 
their deep azure color, and for the phosphorescence 
of the w^ater. Here grew up the Roman nation 
which, at first regal, then republican, and finally 
imperial, ran a splendid career of twelve hundred 
years. With its standing army of three hundred 
and fifty thousand men in fifty legions, and with a 
wonderful system of roads and laws, the Romans 
ruled the earth, from the Pillars of Hercules to the 
Cataracts of the Nile and from the Rhine River to 
the desert of Africa. The common idea of the 

79 



8o THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

" world " to a Roman lay In the word "oikumene," — 
the inhabited part of the earth. 

In the fifth century the Roman empire fell. For 
five hundred years afterwards Italy was harassed by 
the Barbarians who poured in from the North. 
About the tenth century, the people of the towns 
made struggles to govern themselves ; and so there 
grew up many city republics which built walls and 
made themselves independent of the feudal lords or 
nobles. In this way the famous cities of Pisa, 
Florence, Venice, and Genoa sprang up. 

At the head of the Adriatic, where seven or eight 
rivers rolled down their mud and slime into the sea, 
making many islands amid very shallow water, there 
gradually collected together many rich people who 
had fled from the interior cities, when the Huns, 
under Attila, invaded Italy. There, forgotten by 
the Roman rulers, and beyond the reach of the 
Barbarians who had no ships, a population grew 
up, supporting theriiselves by catching fish and 
making salt. Each little island was a republic by 
itself, but sent delegates who met in council and 
elected a doge or duke. In a.d. 809 they made 
choice of the island of Rialto, and built the city of 
Venice as the capital of their republic. 

Twenty years later they sent to Alexandria for 
the body of St. Mark, and made him the patron of 
their state. For centuries the lion of St. Mark 



ITALY, HOME OF COMMERCE AND EXPLORATION. 8 1 

figured on all their arms, their banners, and their 
ships; and the cry, "Viva San Marco," inspired their 
courage in many a sea-fight. Millions of boys were 
named after the lion-like evangelist. For six cen- 
turies the Venetians maintained their independence 
aeainst the Lombards on one side and the Saracens 
on the other. They greatly assisted the first cru- 
saders with their fleets. They steadily enriched 
themselves by commerce with Asia and Africa, and 
extended their sway and influence over many sub- 
ject and neighbor lands. 

On the other side of Italy, a little further south, 
seated grandly on the sea, is the city of Genoa. 
Its splendid harbor is sheltered by the Apennine 
Mountains, and is safely enclosed with moles and 
masonry, against which the sea-waves break in 
vain. It already had a history when Rome and 
Carthage were contesting in a death struggle for 
the supremacy of the Mediterranean. In the sixth 
century, with the disruption of the Roman empire, 
it fell into the hands of the Lombards. Like the 
other Italian coast cities, it suffered so much from 
the Saracens that, in self-defence, its navy was en- 
larged, and thus was laid the foundation of its sea- 
power. In the eleventh century, when the western 
world warred with the Moslems for the sepulchre of 
Jesus, Genoa was a tremendous rival of Venice in 
the crusading business. Both were more eager for 



82 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the profit of transporting crusaders than for getting 
possession of an empty tomb. These two cities, 
with Pisa, had then more vessels on the Mediter- 
ranean than all the rest of Christendom. The 
Genoese encouraged the crusaders with enthusi- 
asm, enjoying the fat contracts made for conveying 
them to Syria. 

Within Genoa the Superb grew up great trading 
firms and princely merchants who built magnificent 
palaces. In 1240 this marine repubHc was able to 
place Michael, the ruler of her choice, upon the 
throne of the Byzantine empire, and to receive, in 
addition to her already extensive eastern posses- 
sions, the suburbs of Constantinople and the great 
fort of Smyrna. With Corsica, Minorca, Marseilles, 
and Nice already in the hands of the Genoese, they 
were able to control, not only, much of the Mediter- 
ranean commerce but also the northern overland 
route to India through the Black and Caspian seas. 
Thus Genoa became amazingly rich, and her sailors 
were to be found in many seas, always ready to 
trade and navigate, and to fight or to quarrel with 
the rival galleys and ships from Venice. 

In these democratic Italian republics, there was 
much turbulence but also much independence of 
spirit, the people being bold, energetic, and indus- 
trious. The wealth and power of the Genoese 
excited the jealousy and cupidity of invaders, 



ITALY, HOME OF COMMERCE AND EXPLORATION. 83 

who several times conquered them; but patriots 
always rose up to deliver and throw off the yoke. 
One of these was the famous Andrea Doria, after 
whom was named our first American ship of war, 
which carried the Declaration of Independence, in 
1776, to the Dutch Island of St. Eustacius in the 
West Indies, where on the i6th of November, from 
the Dutch governor and fort, our colors — the thir- 
teen red and white stripes — received the first for- 
eign salute ever fired in honor of the American 
flag. 

Genoa was under the control of France, and it 
was the time of the greatest quarrels between her 
nobles and people when the feuds of the Guelphs 
and Ghibellines about which Dante has sung, were 
at their height, when in the Colon family there 
were born three sons, — Bartholomew, Christopher, 
and Diego. The name " Colon " is Genoese. The 
form " Columbus" is Latin, and means a dove, just 
as does that of "Jonah," the Hebrew voyager. Each 
of these sons grew up to be interested in ships, 
voyages, and geography. 

It is interesting to walk about Genoa, in the 
streets where the Columbus boys played, to visit 
the wharves and shore, over which they looked 
towards the deep blue waters out of which would 
sail and into which came the gay ships that sought 
and brought the wonders of far-off countries.. One 



84 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

can go there to-day, as I have done, and lodge in 
great gloomy hotels which were once mighty palaces. 
For a little money, one can sleep in the banqueting 
room or audience chamber of a former prince. 

As Christopher grew up, he had to help his 
father — a wool comber by trade — to earn a living 
for the family ; but he also went to school and 
learned a good deal about geography, and to write 
easily in Latin. In 1460, Christopher, when only 
fourteen, took to the sea, becoming a cabin boy 
and doino: some other service that lads were able 
to perform in the galleys of that day. Perhaps it 
seemed then to him as if he might one day become 
a merchant prince with many vessels ; but an event 
occurred, which disappointed hundreds of Genoese, 
stopped their trade, ruined their merchant princes, 
and turned the face of young Christopher from the 
East to the West. 

News came that the Turks had captured Con- 
stantinople, and soon the crest-fallen Genoese cap- 
tains came sailing back with many empty ships. 
They said that the Turks had refused to let them 
pass into the Black Sea, except upon payment of 
tolls so enormous that all profits would be lost. 
Thus, at a blow, the rich trade with the East was 
cut off, and Genoa, for a while, was miserably poor. 
Perhaps the boy of seventeen did not care so much 
about being an Indian merchant, for he kept on 



ITALY, HOME OF COMMERCE AND EXPLORATION. 85 

studying geography and mathematics, and began to 
ask himself whether some other way could not be 
opened to the golden lands of Asia. He was not a 
young man to give up easily. 

Probably about this time Columbus began to 
believe that the earth was round. Nearly two 
thousand years before, some unknown Greek had 
got hold of the idea, and the philosopher Aristotle 
and the geographer Strabo, had talked it over. 
Averroes, a Moorish scholar of the twelfth century, 
at Cordova in Spain, made the idea known in 
Europe. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon had 
also read of, and revived, the dream of a ball-like 
earth hansfino^ in the air. When Alliacus made the 
idea popular in his book, " Imago Mundi," Colum- 
bus thought he w^ould some day be able to prove 
it to all. In his various voyages and talks with 
sea-faring men he got many hints favoring the the- 
ory, and he noticed that ships would rise upon the 
horizon when coming toward him, and sink when 
going away. If the earth were round, why could he 
not find China by sailing the other way towards the 
west.f* He knew that Genoa, his native city, could 
not help him in his enterprises, though he earnestly 
entreated her to do so. Had Genoa been willing or 
rich enough to fit out ships for her son, the new 
world might have become the possession of this 
city republic. 



86 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY, 

It was in the year 1470, when either thirty-four 
or twenty-four years old, that his brother Bartholo- 
mew went to Lisbon, as we have seen, and set up 
in business as a map-maker, selling his goods to the 
many sea-captains at that port. Columbus followed 
his brother, and also drew maps, and made voyages. 
He became ardently interested in the successes of 
Prince Henry's navigators, but he thought out 
another way of steering. In 1474, he began cor- 
responding with the Italian geographer Toscanelli, 
who assured him that his plan of a voyage was 
practicable, and that he could reach Cathay by sail- 
ing westward three thousand miles. He now began 
to broach his proposition to the King of Portugal, 
arguing that such a voyage would greatly enrich 
his possessions and wealth. Meanwhile, he married 
a lady named Felipa Moniz, and probably had three 
children. One of these, Ferdinand, wrote the biog- 
raphy of Columbus, which is the basis of almost all 
the narratives written about the man who gave a 
new world to Spain. 

Enthusiastic as Columbus was, everything seemed 
to confirm his ideas. In 1477 he made a voyage to 
the far North, reaching Iceland, and learning about 
Leif Erikson and Thorfinn's trips to Vineland. He 
was thus still further assured. In those days, fight- 
ing, trading, slave-catching, and slave-selling were 
often done by the same crew in the same vessel. 



ITALY, HOME OF COMMERCE AND EXPLORATION. %y 

Columbus had experiences in a slave-trading expe- 
dition to Guinea, and went on piratical expeditions 
several times ; but while his brother would sail east, 
Christopher insisted on sailing west. 

Christopher got tired of trying to do anything in 
Portugal, and started off for Spain to interest the 
monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, leaving word to 
have his brother go to England and plead his west- 
ern scheme with King Henry VII. While Colum- 
bus chafed and worried in Spain, cooling his heels 
in waiting upon the King and Queen, mocked by 
the boys who thought him a crank, getting poorer 
and poorer, bearing the ridicule of the Council, 
the gray hairs multiplying in his beard and hair, 
he learned of his brother's voyage to the Cape 
of Good Hope. This only made him the more 
resolved to sail the contrary way toward the set- 
ting sun. 

Spain had then a good many reasons for not want- 
ing to risk men, money, or ships in a project that 
seemed like trying to make water run up hill. In 
the first place, the central government was not yet 
strong, or perfectly certain of getting control of all 
the provinces or of driving out the Moors. The 
people were poor after the long wars. The plague 
was sweeping off thousands. The Inquisition was 
not yet a financial success. It had spent more 
money to carry on the hellish work than it got in 



88 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

revenue by confiscating the estates of Jews and 
Moors and other people called " heretics." 

The government would not say either Yes or No 
to Columbus. The learned men to whom the mat- 
ter was referred, — most of whom were too old to 
entertain a new idea, — were yet not unanimous, 
one way or the other ; and while the Court was 
moving about from camp to castle, a long and 
patient hearing of the whole case could not be 
given. Meanwhile, Columbus, though probably 
fifty-six years old and his beard getting grayer, 
kept on arguing. His new friends also firmly sup- 
ported his views. When, finally, the last crescent 
flag had been lowered, and the silken banners of the 
cross waved hio;h in air above the Moorish citadel 
of Granada, there was no further excuse to postpone 
the final decision. 

Yet at this moment, Christopher, hopeless, hungry, 
and footsore, stood with his little son at the door 
of the monastery La Rabida, and begged for food. 
The abbot, who heard his story with patience, had 
been at one time confessor of the Queen, and now 
thought he might have some influence at Court. 
So he went to see the Queen who was, indeed, like 
her Syrian namesake, a Jezebel to heretics, but a 
lovely and Christian Queen to her friends. The 
ofood abbot was successful. A court suit was ob- 
tained for Columbus, who presented himself before 




CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AT THE LA RABIDA MONASTE 



RY. 



ITALY, HOME OF COMMERCE AND EXPLORATION. 89 

the sovereigns at the city of the holy faith, Santa Fe, 
— a name which has been dupHcated in our terri- 
tory of New Mexico. 

At first, the whole project seemed to be wrecked 
because Christopher's terms were too high. He 
wanted to be made admiral of the ocean and viceroy 
of all the lands he should discover ; to keep posses- 
sion of one-tenth of all the gold and other wealth that 
might be acquired, and to have all his rights and 
titles made hereditary. The King was unable at 
first to agree to these demands, for while to Chris- 
topher the scheme was as reality, to Ferdinand it was 
as a dream. So the Genoese came away once more 
disheartened, but firm in his claim. Nevertheless 
three good friends — one a court lady, and another a 
royal minister, and the greatest, the Queen — caught 
enthusiasm from the dreamer, and prevailed with 
the King. Christopher was called back, and the 
compact was signed April 17, 1492. 



CHAPTER IX. 

COLUMBUS SAILS WEST TO REACH THE FAR EAST. 

IT was not until Friday, August 3, 1492, that the 
three ships and crews were ready. As a punish- 
ment for some offence, the people of Palos were 
condemned to furnish three vessels with all 
proper equipments. It is more than probable that 
Jewish merchants assisted with money in the 
enterprise. 

It was hard, however, to get a crew to start out 
under a man who was supposed to be nursing a 
crazy notion. Even by emptying the prisons and 
pardoning debtors and criminals, who were released 
on their promise to enlist as sailors, the necessary 
number of one hundred and twenty men was long 
in being made up ; for, after the jail birds were free, 
many deserted. The quality of the men who were 
finally obtained did not increase the chances of 
success. 

Christopher's motive was perfectly clear. In his 
journal of the voyage, he says, in the introduction, 
that he was sailing with one object in view, which 
was to reach the dominion of the great Mongol 

90 



COLUMBUS SAILS WEST TO REACH THE EAST. 9 1 

Khan, — a line of sovereigns established most prob- 
ably, as we have seen, by the Japanese Yoshitsune. 
In fact, the Genoese was over a century behind the 
times, for the Mongol power in China had fallen a 
hundred and fifty years before, and the Ming dy- 
nasty of pure Chinese emperors had been reigning 
in Nanking since 1368. But there were no tele- 
graphs or newspapers then, and the Turks had for 
many years shut off all tidings from the far East. 
As for Japan, which he hoped to reach, the end of 
the fifteenth century was the poorest and most mis- 
erable time in its history. The King of Spain, 
however, knew no more than the Genoese. 

This is what Columbus wrote : 

" In consequence of the information which I had 
given to your Highnesses of the lands of India and 
of a Prince, who was called the Grand Khan . . . 
therefore your Highnesses determined to send me, 
Christopher Columbus, to see the said Prince and 
the people and lands . . . and ordered that I should 
not go by land to the East, by w^iich it is the cus- 
tom to go, but by a voyage to the West, by which 
course, unto the present time, we do not know for 
certain that any one has passed." 

The Italics are ours. It is probable that Colum- 
bus did not know for certai7i, that any one had 
sailed far westward into the Atlantic, though it is 
quite probable that he had heard of the discoveries 



92 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

of the Norsemen. He must surely have known of 
the voyages of the Enghsh sailors and others who 
made voyages far out into the Atlantic to find An- 
tilia or the island of the Seven Cities, of which we 
shall hear more. On the chart of the globe which 
he had made himself, Japan stands out prominently 
between Europe and Africa, not, as it really is, long 
and narrow between Kamtchatka and the Philip- 
pines, but very broad from east to west, as if 
squeezed flat to fit the theory. Indeed, it was 
wonderfully like a modern railway map on which 
distances are lengthened or shortened to suit the 
advertisement. The whole region under attention 
is squeezed out of proportion, so as to gain patrons 
or furnish a quick view. 

Christopher had the mariner's compass, derived 
from China, but greatly improved. He had also 
the astrolabe, introduced or at least made popular 
by Prince Henry, w^ith which he could find out his 
position by taking observations of the stars or sun. 

Best of all, he had profound faith — in God, in the 
possibility of success, and in his personal mission. 
He and his men went to church to ask the divine 
blessing upon their adventure. Then, although it 
was Friday, Admiral Columbus sailed away a half- 
hour before sunrise. 

His little squadron consisted of the ship Santa 
Maria, or Holy Mary, of one hundred tons' burden; 



COLUMBUS SAILS WEST TO REACH THE EAST. 93 

with two caravels named Nina and Piiita. Only 
the ship was decked, each of the other vessels hav- 
ing but a light floor at bow and stern. 
'^ The caravels got their name from beetles, being the 
same as the Egyptian "scarab," — the word "cara- 
vel " meaning a little beetle. They were narrow at 
the poop and wide at the bow. Each had four 
masts and a bowsprit. The principal sails were 
lateen ; that is, sails fastened at the top along the 
boom, which was coupled at the centre of the mast, 
while the lower ends of the sails were held by ropes 
tied at the base of the ship. Extending from little 
masts on the bow were two square sails. In those 
days everything was rich in color, and the painted 
canvas sails were magnificent with designs of the 
cross, the heraldry of the King of Spain, the arms 
of Aragon and Castile, and the images of the bleed- 
ing Christ. Nevertheless, these caravels were very 
disagreeable sea-craft with which to attempt a long 
voyage. 

Reaching the Canary Islands, the frontier of the 
old world, several weeks were lost in mending 
the clumsy rudder of one vessel, and in altering 
the sail of another. At last, on September 6, they 
began, as it seemed to the men, climbing up the 
water-hill of the world and sliding down on the 
other side, until the islands faded from sight. Then 
there were weeping eyes. Bearded men broke out 



94 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

into bitter lamentations, because they had bidden 
farewell to " the habitable world." 

Hundreds of years afterwards, orators and essay- 
ists wishing to magnify Christopher Columbus and 
move their auditors by exciting in them enthu- 
siasm or religious jealousy, hatred, or prejudice, 
have tried to tell a wonderful story of mutiny, to 
show that the Admirals life was in danger. They 
have striven to crowd into this journey on the 
water awful and significant adventures ; but, as a 
matter of fact, it was a very ordinary, hum-drum 
voyage. The simple truth is, as we read it in 
his own diary of the cruise, only one thing seemed 
very wonderful to Columbus himself. That was 
the variation of the magnetic needle, which trem- 
bled away to the northwest rather than to the 
northeast. This phenomenon startled the Ad- 
miral, and especially his subaltern and crew. 

When thirty-one days out from sight of land, 
a flock of birds — not sea-gulls or petrels — flew in 
front of the ship, moving to the southwest. Seeing 
them, Alonzo Pinzon, captain of the Pinta, begged 
Columbus to follow in their track. The Admiral 
yielded, and these land birds became pilots to the 
Spaniards. 

Thus it came to pass that He who guides the 
raven and sees the sparrow fall, ordered that the 
Latin emigrants and civilization should find their 



COLUMBUS SAILS WEST TO REACH THE EAST. 95 

home in central and southern America, while the 
northern and better America should be as yet 
unknown. 

Still the ships kept on. On the evening of the 
thirty-fifth day, even while Admiral Christopher 
was wondering whether, after all, he should have 
to turn back to satisfy the clamors of his men, he 
saw ahead a light. Early in the morning of Thurs- 
day, October ii, a sailor in the top shouted the 
good news, — " Land!" Soon the sun rose, reveal- 
ing the low, sandy shore of Watling's Island, around 
part of which they had sailed during the night. 

With fine dress and banners, and all display of 
costume and weapons, appropriate for the signifi- 
cant ceremony, Admiral Columbus in a panoply of 
steel, and his men in armor, landed. According 
to the custom of discoverers, and in signification of 
possession, Columbus and his men kneeled and 
kissed the ground. With wet eyes, they poured 
out their thankso^ivin^f to God. Then, with the 
ceremonies of the church, Columbus planted the 
banners of Aragon and Castile. The splendid 
colors waved to the wind, while he took possession 
of the country for Ferdinand and Isabella and their 
viceroy, Columbus. 

The natives called the land "Cat Island," but 
Columbus baptized it " San Salvador," or " Holy 
Saviour." One of the first questions he asked was 



96 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

whether this was Japan, but the only answer, and, 
indeed, the only conversation possible, was by signs. 
Thinking that any land that was not of Europe 
must be of Asia, and that he was in the Indies, he 
called the people " Indians." One of the first 
things he noticed was that some of the men wore 
pieces of gold hung from their noses, and Colum- 
bus was anxious to know whether they had more. 
By signs they informed him that " there was a king 
in the south who owned many vessels filled with 



gold." 



Perhaps these islanders had in mind the gilded 
chieftain in South America, who, when elected, 
powdered himself with gold, and then, going out 
on a eold-decorated raft to the middle of a lake, 
plunged in and washed off the gold-dust as an 
offerinc: to the Q-oddess of the lake. From this 
moment began a quest of the golden man and the 
chasing of phantoms that led thousands of Span- 
iards to miseries of hunger and thirst, starvation 
and death. 

The Spaniards also visited other Bahama Islands, 
and then landed on Cuba in November. Pinzon 
was the discoverer of Hayti, or San Domingo, 
though he got no credit for it. The party spent 
most of the winter in the delightful climate, though 
losing the Santa Maria by shipwreck. However, 
the Admiral saved her timbers, and with them built 



COLUMBUS SAILS WEST TO REACH THE EAST, 97 

a fort on the northern side of Hayti, to which he 
gave the name of " Little Spain," or " Hispaniola." 
As he had stepped upon this island on Christmas 
Day, he called the place " Nativity," or " Birth- 
day," " La Navidad." Everywhere the people were 
friendly, for the Spaniards seemed like visitors 
from heaven. The natives were soon cruelly un- 
deceived. 

Columbus thought that it would be easy for his 
men to get along very well with such gentle people. 
So he selected forty men from his crew, which would 
be rather crowded on the two vessels remaining, and 
left them to form the first European settlement in 
the new land. 

Then, after salutes and farewells, he turned his 
two prows homeward, and after a very stormy 
voyage, he arrived safely March 15, 1493. He and 
his companions were welcomed as those who had 
come back from the dead. 

H 



CHAPTER X. 

THE POPE CUTS THE WORLD IN HALF. 

THE westward movements of men from the sea 
of Japan to the Bosphorus drove the Greek 
scholars of Constantinople all over Europe, and the 
Italian mariners to the maritime states facing the 
Atlantic. Christopher Columbus became the most 
famous of all, because, although he did not discover 
the American continent, he was original and daring 
in sailing westward across the Atlantic. 

Columbus did not get many thanks or much honor, 
after the first splendid reception awarded him by King 
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Indeed, nobody 
supposed that he had discovered a new world, but 
only some projecting land or islands running out 
from the Asian continent. Nevertheless, it was be- 
lieved that he had found a new pathway to the Indies. 
At once there began a great rivalry, with the possi- 
bilities of a bitter quarrel, between Portugal and 
Spain, just as there had been between Venice and 
Genoa, but with new features added. As Venice 
had enjoyed the southern, and Genoa the northern 
route to the riches of Asia, so Portugal, having 

98 



THE POPE CUTS THE WORLD IN HALF. 99 

opened the southern path to India, feared that 
Spain, by taking the northern or western route, 
would gain even more wealth. The Portuguese re- 
garded Columbus as being only a disciple of Prince 
Henry, who had won success by following his 
methods. 

What promised to be a dangerous quarrel was 
averted by ah Italian prince, living in Rome, who 
ruled a small territory called the States of the Church 
around the city on the Tiber, in area about the size 
of Maryland and Delaware. Italians were first to 
discover and then to divide the world. This Italian 
prince, the Pope, was then considered to be the 
head of all the Christian churches, except the Greek 
Catholic church, w^hich extended over Russia and 
Greece. At that time it was believed that the 
whole world w-as under papal control, because the 
Pope claimed to be the vicar of God. The nations 
of the earth not yet known — it was thought — 
ought to be, and sooner or later w^ould be, under 
the control of the spiritual head of the church. 

During the middle ages, most men held the 
same idea about the dominance of the relis^ious over 
the political organization of society, — of Church 
over State, — as w^as common in such countries as 
Russia, Turkey, China, Japan, and the African king- 
doms. Such ideas have for the most part died out 
of the world, or are steadily sinking out of sight, but 



lOO THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

formerly they were very powerful. No king or 
nation would have thought of owning any land 
which the sailors or foreigners in their employ 
had discovered, unless claim to ownership was first 
ratified by the Pope. 

In accordance with the ideas of the age, the Pope, 
in decrees called bulls (from the " bulla " or round 
seal), had already confirmed Portugal in the posses- 
sion of the islands and countries of Africa dis- 
covered by its people. Knowing this, as soon as 
Columbus had returned, Ferdinand applied to the 
Italian Pope-Prince, as his spiritual superior, to 
confirm the Spanish claims to the countries beyond 
the western ocean already sighted or which might 
be discovered. Pope Alexander VI. in his bull of 
demarcation, dated May 3, 1493, confirmed the 
Spanish claim. Drawing a line from north to 
south out in the Atlantic Ocean, three hundred 
miles west of the Azores, where the compass 
pointed exactly north, his Holiness divided the 
world in two portions. All lands newly discovered 
by the Portuguese, which did not belong to any other 
Christian prince on the east of this line were to be 
the property of Portugal. Everything, not already 
possessed by Christians west of the line, was to be 
Spain's. Thus, as easily as a boy divides an apple, 
the Pope cut the world in half. 

This at first satisfied the Portuguese, but later they 



THE POPE CUTS THE WORLD IN HALF. lOI 

petitioned their spiritual superior to draw the Hne 
eio^ht hundred miles farther west. His Holiness 
assented, and a treaty between Spain and Portugal 
was signed June 7, 1494. By this clever arrange- 
ment, the Portuguese held possession of Brazil after 
it had been discovered by Cabral in 1500, though 
Pinzon the Spaniard had made landfall on its coast 
earlier in the same year. 

Thus it came to pass, that the Pope became one 
more of those Italians who busied themselves with 
the new world, its discoveries, and its conquests, and 
yet who never owned a foot of land within it. Of 
such Italians there were many, and Italy sent forth 
the sowers to make harvest fields for others to reap. 
" Unhappy Italy that beats the bush, while others 
catch the bird," wrote Peter Martyr. Portugal 
founded a school for navigators. Italy sent out 
the pioneers. Spain won the new world and lost it. 
France founded a vast, but transient empire. Eng- 
land did least exploring, yet founded a new nation. 

It was not only the seafaring people of Venice 
and Genoa who found their occupation gone when 
the Turks blocked the eastern trade routes, but also 
many others in Italian cities who directly or indi- 
rectly had been growing rich by the lucrative traffic 
in spices and gold. It is in the latter half of the 
fifteenth century that we find Italian merchants, 
bankers, engineers, artists, and skilled mechanics 



I02 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

moving northward and settling in France and Ger- 
many, and in the Netherlands (or lowlands of west- 
ern Europe, which are now Belgium and Holland), 
and in England. 

In the large cities of these countries, one can see 
to-day more than one " Lombard Street," where the 
business men from Lombardy had their banking 
offices, goldsmiths' shops, and warehouses. Other 
thoroughfares and many families in Europe and 
America are named after Italian cities, places, and 
persons. The Longo-bards, or long-bearded bar- 
barians, anciently from northwestern Germany, after 
centuries of residence in Italy, had become keen and 
shrewd money-lenders and merchants. At this time 
also, in England especially, but also in the Nether- 
lands, Italian mechanics, engineers, and doctors 
found employment and introduced many good ideas 
and inventions. Italian was studied, and notably 
influenced the English language and literature. 
Fleets of Venetian and Genoese ships found that 
trade with Netherlands and England, though not, 
indeed, so profitable as with the East, was well 
worth cultivating and increasing. Antwerp became 
a very rich city, with its harbor ever full of ships, 
while London and Norwich, the two largest English 
business centres, also profited by this commerce. 
Their shops and stores were full of Italian novel- 
ties and the rich dresses, fashions, and notions 



THE POPE CUTS THE WORLD IN HALF. 103 

imported from the Mediterranean nations. The 
jewels, stuffs, pictures, art works, rugs, and carpets 
from Italy beautified English noblemen's castles, 
the houses of the court ladies and gentlemen, and 
rich merchants' dwellings. 

At that time Bristol, in Devonshire, with its 
curious little narrow, but deep, Avon stream, the 
river of Wyckliffe and Shakespeare, was the chief 
western seaport of the country, and had a good 
trade with the southern countries. There was liv- 
ing here with his wife and three sons, a Venetian 
merchant and navigator, whose name in its English 
form is John Cabot. He had travelled in Arabia, 
and had been at Mecca, where he saw many cara- 
vans, as in the days of Joseph and the Midianites, 
laden with balm and spicery. On inquiry, he found 
that they came from the far East. Like most edu- 
cated Italians, Cabot believed the world was round. 
When he heard of the exploit of his fellow-country- 
man, and perhaps his fellow-citizen, Christopher 
Columbus, proud of Italy, but jealous for Venice, 
the republic and city of which he was a naturalized 
citizen, Cabot longed also to share in the glory of 
new discoveries, and to win the favor of King 
Henry VII. Besides romantic notions, his practical 
object, like that of all the other navigators, was to 
find the lands of jewels and spices, so as to control 
the trade in them, if possible, for liis sovereign. 



104 ^^^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

King Henry, who took no stock in the project of 
Bartholomew Columbus, would take none directly 
in Cabot's venture. He was perfectly willing, how- 
ever, to let the people of Bristol fit out and pay for 
any expedition they might send, while he gave his 
royal commission to this brilliant Italian. 



CHAPTER XI. 

JOHN CABOT SAILS TO SEEK ANTILIA AND THE SEVEN 

CITIES. 

TN all human history men are moved as much by 
^ sentiment as by matter-of-fact considerations. 
Now it happened that romance as well as prosaic 
love of money led to the equipment of the ship 
Matthew, with its total crew of nineteen men, com- 
manded by John Cabot, which sailed from Bristol, 
England, at sunrise June 24, 1497. This little craft 
opened a gateway, not for the Italian, but for the 
English language, people, laws, and ideas, on this 
American continent. Cabot sailed not only on the 
Atlantic, but into American history in a way he 
never dreamed of. On what he did and on what 
he saw, all subsequent English and British claims 
to North America were based. Yet he was not 
seeking the stern reality which he actually met, 
but a city of fairy tales, an island of legend, the 
pots of gold that are found only at the roots of a 
rainbow. 

The story runs, that when Tarik the Saracen 
landed in Portugal and began its conquest, the 

105 



I06 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

bishop of Oporto with thousands of his fellow- 
Christians fled to an island far out in the western 
Atlantic, where he -founded seven cities. This was 
called Antilia, or the island of the Seven Cities. 
It was filled with riches of all kinds, even the shore 
sparkling with golden sands which no one cared for. 
It was supposed to lie in front of the west of the Cape 
de Verde group; that is, it was ante-insula or Antilia. 

The re-discovery of these islands which had been 
known to the Romans, by the Portuguese excited a 
lively interest in Bristol. Every year, between 
1484 and 1490, the sailors of Devonshire had made 
a voyage far westward into the ocean to find the 
golden strand. After six voyages, the commander 
of the seventh was to find land. 

So, like Jason and the Argonauts in search of 
the golden fleece, John Cabot pointed his prow 
toward the settingr sun to find Antilia and the 
Seven Cities, and to take possession of the island 
of the golden sands for King Henry and England. 
If not Antilia, he hoped to reach Japan, or China, 
or spice-lands, or the Golden Chersonese. He 
sailed due west in the high latitudes, instead of 
going south to the Cape de Verde Islands. He 
kept nearer the Arctic Circle than to the Tropic of 
Cancer. 

Very little indeed is known of this voyage. 
Cabot saw no human being at his landfall some- 



JOHN CABOT SAILS TO SEEK ANTILIA. lO/ 

where in British America, probably at Cape Breton. 
Instead of sparkHng gold or cities, he found a bleak 
and rocky coast. He landed in what he thought 
was the territory of Genghis Khan's successors. 
He set up the symbol of the Christian faith, with 
the flags of England and Venice — the cross of 
St. Georo^e and the lion of St. Mark. Beino: out of 
provisions, though fish were amazingly abundant in 
the sea, he turned his prow homewards, but over 
his larboard he saw tw^o islands. 

All that we really know of John Cabot's voyage 
is this : some years afterwards, his son Sebastian 
Cabot, who may or may not have been with his 
father, drew a map and wrote on it : — 

" In the year of our Lord 1497, John Cabot, a 
Venetian, and his son Sebastian discovered that 
country which no one before his time had ventured 
to approach, on the 24th of June, about five o'clock 
in the morning." 

It is not probable that many English people even 
as much as heard of this voyage till many years 
later, or that the Bristol people set much value 
upon the discovery, though King Henry VII. made 
the Venetian a present of ten pounds sterling for 
finding " the new isle." John Cabot, however, was 
called the Grand Admiral. He dressed in silk, 
when silk was excessively rare in England. He 
maintained a retinue on the streets, and the people 



I08 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

of Bristol ran after him as if he were a second 
Columbus. He made a map of his discovery and a 
globe which excited interest in England. He died 
probably the next year. 

Cabot had not found Antilia, but others went 
sailing over the seas to reach it. Myths and fairy 
tales, which men think true, are long in dying. 
We shall see the Spaniards, during the next cen- 
tury, chasing the myth of the Seven Cities among 
the Zunis and their cliff dwellings in New Mexico, 
and even among the buffaloes in Kansas. As for 
Antilia, the name survives in the Antilles of the 
West Indies, of which Cuba is " the pearl." 

Sebastian, the second son, nobly took up his 
father's work and carried it farther. Believing that 
the earth was a globe, he argued that the shortest 
path to the dominions of Genghis Khan lay far up 
north where the degrees of longitude approached 
each other. This young Venetian, in 1498, with a 
squadron manned by English volunteers, crossed 
the Atlantic. Although it was in July, they could 
not set foot on Labrador because of the dense mass 
of icebergs. The daylight lasting eighteen hours 
was excellent for exploration, and they landed at 
many points, noticing that the native dressed in fur 
clothing, and had ornaments and tools of copper. 
Fish were so plentiful that the ships seemed to 
plough their way through them. The bears came 



JOHN CABOT SAILS TO SEEK ANT ILIA. lOQ 

down to the shore and used their claws for grappHng 
hooks, pulHng the cod out of the water and feasting 
on them. The deer were bigger than those in 
England. He called the country Baccalaos, or cod- 
fish land. He sailed somewhere southwardly and 
then returned home. 

There was not much in England at this time to 
keep an enterprising Italian on her shores, and 
there was little appreciation anywhere of what the 
Cabots had done. Sebastian Cabot entered the 
service of Spain, and made other voyages. He 
came back to England in 1547, where he made 
maps and globes, and was chosen president of an 
English company, organized to trade with Russia 
through Archangel. He died in London about 

1558. 

Yet, at such a time the discoveries of the Cabots 
had no more practical importance than had the 
voyages of the Norsemen. They could not, in 
that age and in that era of thought, be of any 
special benefit to England. They did not, and 
they could not, produce any special desire for 
further discoveries ; certainly not any for coloniza- 
tion or possession. The rest of the European 
world was mightily excited over the new regions 
beyond sea, and book after book on the subject was 
printed; but in England it was not till 1509, in 
a funny pamphlet called the " Ship of Fools," that 



no THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

there was any reference made in English Hterature 
either to Columbus' or to Cabot's wonderful dis- 
covery. At that time England was influenced by 
Latin ideas in religion, and under the spiritual con- 
trol of the Pope ; and there was no thought of 
breaking with his authority, which had been exer- 
cised in the division of the earth. For sixty years 
the story of the Cabot discoveries was unwritten in 
England, and popularly unknown there. 

The Pope had already cut the globe into Portu- 
guese and Spanish hemispheres, and any claim of 
right founded on discovery must be confirmed by 
the Pope, in order to be valid. Few Englishmen 
of that day would have thought of disregarding 
the Pope's command. Until Latin ideas had been 
given up, the yoke of the Pope's authority cast off, 
and the people possessed the new world of ideas 
that came in with the Reformation, the English 
cared little for exploration. Then the proofs of 
Cabot's discoveries were used as a sponge to wipe 
out the Pope's bull of demarcation, as one erases 
chalk writing from a blackboard. When money and 
the profits of trade and the fisheries rose clearly 
in sight, the English were stirred to conquest 
and colonization. This will appear more clearly 
in future chapters, when we shall see that, by the 
Reformation, all the northern maritime nations 
found a new sphere upon the ocean. The sea 



JOHN CABOT SAILS TO SEEK A NT I LI A. Ill 

became the cradle of the Reformation, and its 
power was born on the waves. 

The time came, in due course, when the pen 
proved to be mightier than the prow. In 1553, 
fifty-six years after John Cabot's American landfall, 
Mr. Richard Eden, who had known the old man, 
Sebastian Cabot, and seen him die, wrote a little 
book, " A Treatise on the New India." This 
roused the English folk to see that their Italian 
guests, the Cabots, had found a great world for 
them to conquer and colonize. Eden was a great 
admirer of the Spaniards, and wanted the English 
to convert the Indians. He published another 
book, giving much information from Spanish and 
other authors about America. He saw Philip II. 
of Spain and Queen Mary enter London in 1554 
on their marriage journey. 

Yet not until after the reign of Bloody Mary, 
and when Elizabeth had long been seated on the 
throne, and hostilities with Spain begun, did Eng- 
lish sailors venture on the deep seas. Then, more 
than a century after John Cabot's glimpse of Occi- 
dental land, the west-country mariners of England 
sailed the seas over. They made little pretence 
of discovery or exploration. Their real object was 
to spoil the Spaniards. 



CHAPTER XII. 

AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME, AND THE WORLD IS 
SAILED ROUND. 

COLUMBUS had not reached Japan or China, 
but he still believed he would get there. 
When Ferdinand and Isabella confirmed him in all 
his rights and titles, they also authorized the equip- 
ment of a new and larger fleet of seventeen vessels, 
which sailed September 25, 1493. There was noth- 
ing to do but sail straio^ht ahead till near the West 
India Islands. Nearly a month was spent at Porto 
Rico. When, late in November, they came to the 
settlement, they found nothing but the bones of 
their former comrades, who had been unable to 
maintain authority among themselves or to keep 
peace with the natives. Selecting a spot thirty 
miles further east, Columbus founded the first Eu- 
ropean city in America. 

The crew of this second expedition were, for the 
most part, lazy and avaricious men. Unused to 
work, they made poor colonists with which to begin 
an empire. New and strange diseases broke out 



112 



AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME. I13 

among them ; and even Columbus fell ill. He had 
written March 14, 1493, before leaving Europe, 
promising their Invincible Majesties all the gold 
they needed; but when, in 1494, he was obliged to 
send home twelve of his ships, instead of lading 
them with gold or gems, he had only a gloomy re- 
port of death, sickness, and woe. Besides this, he 
made a proposition that African slaves be sent over 
to labor for the colony. Columbus, neither better 
nor worse than the men of his age, thus laid the 
foundation of slavery in America, both of the red 
and the black man. 

Although the merciful King and Queen did not 
approve of his plan, Columbus had five shiploads 
of black men Irom Guinea sent to these new Indies. 
In the island itself, the natives were conquered by 
treachery and murder. The Spaniards levied upon 
the conquered natives a tribute in the form of a 
hawk's bell full of gold, once in three months, with 
the alternative, in the case of inability to get the 
gold, of working like slaves on the farms of their 
conquerors. The hawk's bell was a tiny measure 
shaped like a small sleigh-bell, but most of the Indi- 
ans could not furnish the precious metal, and so 
were enslaved. This cruel order produced more 
war, bloodshed, and misery. Within a generation 
the whole population of Hayti — an island nearly as 
large as Maine — was swept away through the re- 



114 



THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 



morseless cruelties of the Spaniards. The coming 
of the white man was that of the wolf among 
lambs. 

In April, 1494, Columbus left the colony to ex- 
plore unknown lands to the west. On the 12th of 
June, just as he thought he was getting near some 
great Chinese city full of gold, his men refused to 
go any further, and he was obliged to turn back. 
But, before he would yield, he compelled eighty of 
them to swear that they had touched the continent, 
and that it was possible to reach Spain by travelling 
westward overland. Whoever, on his return home, 
should break his oath was to be heavily fined and 
have his tongue cut out. Returning to Hayti, Co- 
lumbus found that his brother, Bartholomew, had ar- 
rived, and that some of the party had seized his ship 
and gone home, where they spread very damaging 
reports about Christopher. The King, therefore, 
sent out an agent, to inquire into affairs, who reached 
the colony in October, 1495. Columbus then de- 
cided to go home and plead his cause before the 
King and Queen. After nearly three years' absence 
he reached Cadiz, June 11, 1496. 

All went well with the Admiral, while in the pres- 
ence of Ferdinand and Isabella, who renewed his 
commissions and assisted him to fit out a new fleet 
of eight ships. It was still very hard to get crews, 
for the people of Spain in general were thoroughly 



AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME. 115 

disappointed. Instead of being loaded down with 
yellow metal, his sailors had brought back yellow 
faces, made so by strange and awful diseases. Not 
a little of the wealth imported into Spain was in 
the form of human flesh, to be sold in Europe as 
slaves. The street loafers called Columbus the Ad- 
miral of Mosquito Land and the man mighty in 
promises who had done nothing. After long de- 
lays, the Admiral was able to secure the required 
crews by getting the privilege of transporting crim- 
inals to the West Indies. Such a policy could not 
but stamp the very name of colonist and colony 
with disgrace and ignominy. 

It was not until May 30, 1498, that the ships 
sailed. This time Columbus steered in a southerly 
course, and his first landfall w^as at an island with 
three peaks which he called the Trinity or Trini- 
dad. In our days this island, from its lakes of 
asphalt, furnishes us with material for roofs and 
pavements. A few days later, August i, 1498, Co- 
lumbus sighted the low land at the mouth of the 
Orinoco River, and this was most probably the 
first view of the mainland of America, by Colum- 
bus or by any Italian or Spaniard. He noticed the 
fresh waters rushing out into the salt sea, and called 
the place the Dragon's Mouth. The land was later 
called Little Venice, or Venezuela. When the Ad- 
miral reached Hayti on the last day of August, both 



Il6 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the colony itself and its relation to the natives were 
at the worst. 

Now came melancholy days for Columbus. He 
got into a quarrel with Francis Roldan, who was 
ambitious and perhaps treacherous, and whom Co- 
lumbus finally sent off to Spain with his adherents, 
each one being allowed a slave or woman. The 
reports of these men on their arrival added fuel to 
the fires of detraction already kindled by the enemies 
of the Genoese of whom so many Spaniards were 
jealous. A new cargo of slaves added to the irrita- 
tion felt at Court, and King Ferdinand sent out an 
officer of his household named Bobadilla, who ex- 
ceeded his authority, for he sent Columbus home in 
chains. This was more than the sovereigns had 
intended. Yet, although they would not again give 
Columbus command of the island, they gave him 
another fleet of four ships for further explorations, 
and agreed to protect his estate. 

Still strong in his belief that China or Japan would 
be his next landfall, the Admiral again started west- 
ward. Refused help at Hayti, he sailed on between 
Cuba and Jamaica, skirting the coast of Central 
America, and getting into the tornadoes of that re- 
gion. Among the names he gave, Costa Rica, or the 
Rich Coast, still holds its own. He explored the 
rim of the sea and the edge of the land from the Isle 
of Pines to the east of the Isthmus of Darien, find- 



AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME. 1 17 

ing some gold, many storms, but no path to Asia. 
By August 1 2, 1 503, all his vessels had been wrecked, 
and he was left stranded on a barren island, with 
a prospect of starvation. His brave companion 
Mendez volunteered to reach Hayti in an open 
boat, and succeeded. Columbus and his fellow- 
survivors, on June 25, 1504, after ten months of 
suffering, saw over the waves the relief boats ap- 
proaching. A few weeks were spent in the colony. 
The battered old man reached Spain after a stormy 
voyage, only to find that his best friend Queen Isa- 
bella was dead, and that the King now cared very 
little for him. He could get no help, and his pite- 
ous letters were in vain. He died at Valladolid, 
May 20, 1506, but his dust and bones were carried 
across the ocean, over which he was the first to sail, 
and were deposited in the cathedral of San Domingo, 
before the year 1549. In 1796, with imposing cere- 
monies, their removal to Havana, in Cuba, was 
accomplished. 

The island on which the first Spanish settlement 
in America began, later passed into the control of 
France, and then after revolution became the seat 
of the negro republics, Hayti and San Domingo. 
President Grant was once eager to have the United 
States purchase San Domingo, but the sentiment 
of our country was so strong against him that the 
project was abandoned. In course of time all the 



Il8 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Spanish possessions in America, except Cuba, were 
lost to Spain. 

Painfully and miserably, Christopher Columbus 
gained the aureole of immortal fame. Before he 
died, about seven thousand miles of the coast of 
the double continent had been discovered and 
mapped. During his life, Hispaniola was the chief 
seat of gold production in these western lands, 
and from 1492 to 15 10, five hundred thousand 
ducats of gold were sent to Spain from this place ; 
whence also the hammock was introduced into 
Europe. Peter Martyr, as early as 1494, spoke of 
a " new world," though yet a very little one. Com- 
merce between the lately explored Africa and the 
newly discovered America was almost wholly in 
human flesh and blood. 

It was not only an Italian from Spain who first 
steered westward, and discovered the West Indian 
archipelago and South America, an Italian and 
his son from England, who sighted islands and 
coasts in the ice-regions of North America, an 
Italian in Italy who divided the world in half and 
gave it away, but the whole double continent of 
America bears an Italian name. Amerigo Ves- 
pucci was a Florentine, born for trade rather than 
for learning, March 9, 145 1. The boy Amerigo 
was educated by his uncle, a Dominican monk. In 
the business house of the great merchant princes, 



AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME. 1 19 

Medici, he found employment until the failure of 
the Eastern trade. Then went to Cadiz. Later, he 
was employed by another Florentine named Berandi, 
and helped in preparing Columbus' second expedi- 
tion in 1493. When Berandi, who had taken a 
royal contract to fit out another fleet, died, Vespucci 
stepped forward and fulfilled the contract. 

Vespucci kept up an interest in his old home, and 
wrote letters to the chief magistrate of Florence. 
All we know about the travels in the westward 
world, of America's godfather, are from transla- 
tions of these letters which perhaps have long ago 
perished. We gather from them that Vespucci 
made four voyages, each beginning in May, and 
that two of them, in 1497 and 1499, were for the 
King of Spain, Vespucci acting probably as pilot 
or factor. With four ships, in the first expedition, 
he says that he reached land, " upon a coast which 
we thought to be that of a continent, which many 
think to be the northern coast of South America." 
This would bring him within sight of the American 
continent, several weeks earlier than Cabot's land- 
fall, and fourteen months before Columbus caught 
sio-ht of South America at the Orinoco. 

How^ever, Vespucci never claimed the honor of 
the discovery of the double continent, or of nam- 
ins: the Americas. How America came to be this 
Italian's namesake happened in a curious way. In 



120 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY, 

1507, the year after Columbus died, at the college 
in the little French town Saint Die, was a German 
teacher of geography named Martin Waldseemiiller, 
who published his lecture notes in a Latin pamphlet 
entitled "An Introduction to a Description of the 
World." To this booklet of a few pages, a copy of 
which is now worth its weight in gold, he added 
translations into Latin of Vespucci's letters. He 
also wrote, "The Fourth part of the world having 
been discovered by Americus, it may be called 
Amerige ; that is, the land of Americus or Amer- 
ica." These letters were widely read, for Latin 
was the one tongue common to all educated people 
in Europe. Thus, this German, whose countrymen 
had so little to do with the discovery of America, — 
though afterward a good deal to do with the making 
of it, — gave the new world a name that stuck to it. 

Though applied at first only to the South Ameri- 
can continent, just as Asia was originally only the 
name of a province, it soon became that of the whole 
land-mass between the poles. 

Vespucci was a friend of Columbus, and probably 
had no idea of taking away any glory from him or 
from Cabot. In 15 15, after Vespucci had been dead 
three years, and the idea that the earth was round 
had become quite common, the German, Schooner, 
made his famous globe. This is the way the world 
then looked to the Europeans : we see the name 



AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME. 121 

America applied to the South American continent. 
Something is known, also, of the mainland lying 
north, but it is not yet called North America. 
There is plenty of sea or vacant space above the 
latitude of Labrador. Westward, Japan, as a single 
long island, is apparently but a few miles off. Still 
further to the Occident, upper India projects out 
within a short distance of Japan. If the Italians 
discovered, the Germans named, America. A large 
portion of the northern part of South America was 
later explored by Germans, to whom the Emperor 
Charles V., in 1529, leased the province of Venez- 
uela as security for a loan of money. For a century 
or so, Germans and Spaniards were on a mad hunt 
for that American will-of-the-wisp, El kojjibre dorado, 
or the gilded man. 

Only gradually did the real idea of a " new world," 
and of a great continent lying between Europe and 
China, get into the heads of the people of Europe. 
America was yet very far from being fully discovered. 
Certainly its real character was not known. Even if 
they talked about a "new world," they meant simply 
some western coasts and islands newly discovered. 
It was reserved for a Portuguese, who afterwards 
became a naturalized Spaniard, to be the real dis- 
coverer of America not merely at one or two points, 
but as a continent by itself, and a very large obstacle 
in the way to China, while one of his ships actually 



122 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

sailed around the globe, being the first to circum- 
navigate it. 

It is true that the western side of North America 
was revisited by Drake, the Englishman, after the 
Spaniards had seen and sailed along it, and that 
after Magellan, much remained still to be discov- 
ered. Indeed, much of the North American conti- 
nent, whose northern end is still unknown, even now 
remains to be explored. We cannot yet say whether 
the North Pole is in the water or on the land. 

Magellan was a boy about thirteen years old when 
he first heard of the triumphs of Columbus. F'rom 
his twenty-fifth to his thirty-second year he accom- 
panied those Portuguese ships which sailed clear 
into the Malay Archipelago, and among the Spice 
Islands. While fighting the Moors in Morocco, in 
15 14, he first thought out the plan of getting through 
America in order to find China; for Balboa's dis- 
covery had shown that there was an ocean beyond. 
Because his own government, as he thought, had 
treated him badly, and would not aid him, he applied 
to Spain, and became a Spanish citizen. Reaching 
the splendid city of Seville in October, 15 17, he 
lived in the house of an exiled Portuguese, Diego 
Barboza, a man of position and influence, whose 
daughter he married. There, amid the groves 
of oranges, lemons, and olives he awaited his 
opportunity. 



AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME. 1 23 

The young Netherlander, born in Ghent, who 
became the great Emperor Charles V., was now 
King of Spain, and he looked kindly upon young 
Magellan's scheme to tap the riches of the Chinas 
and the Indies. Bishop Fonseca, who had opposed 
Columbus, Balboa, and Cortez, was also warmly 
interested. Magellan's proposal was to take a 
Spanish fleet to the Malay Archipelago over a new 
route. At this time the Portuguese were trading 
directly with India and the Spice Islands by an all- 
sea route around Africa. The Court of Lisbon 
protested, and tried to prevent Magellan's expedi- 
tion by offering him and his friends brilliant in- 
ducements to return to Portugal. Magellan was 
warned to keep clear of that half of the world 
belonging to Portugal, but he expected to reach 
the other spice regions, which were inside the 
Spanish meridian, by sailing westward. A rich 
merchant joined him and offered to go on private 
speculation, but Charles V. finally sent out at gov- 
ernment expense five ships, which swung clear of 
their moorings at San Lucas September 20, 15 19. 

Touching at Madeira, trading with the Indians 
on the Brazilian coast, exploring the Rio de la 
Plata, following the unknown coast of Patagonia, 
he reached, March 31, the port of San Julian, where 
a mutineer was hanged. Magellan decided to re- 
main here till finer weather came on. Leavino^ late 



124 ^^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

in August, he discovered, on October 21, the day 
holy to the Eleven Thousand Virgins, the strait 
which he called after St. Ursula and her throng 
of martyr maidens, " Todos Los Santos." He sent 
in two ships to explore the inlet, but they could 
find no end to it; as it is over three hundred miles 
long. So, thinking that he had discovered the 
passage to China, Magellan ordered the whole fleet 
through. They spent a month at the work, stop- 
ping often to fish or explore. Reaching the open 
ocean November 28, Magellan called it " Pacific," 
or the peaceful sea, on account of the fine weather. 
This strait has ever since been a well-travelled 
highway. It was named " Magellan " by the Span- 
iards, Cape Virgin and Cape Holy Spirit being at 
each entrance. 

Magellan now steered for the north. His men 
suffered greatly from bad food and water, which 
brought on scurvy, that ancient enemy of the 
sailor. From this disease seafaring men have suf- 
fered for ages, until toward the middle of this cen- 
tury, when onions and other vegetables, lime-juice 
and anti-scorbutics have routed the enemy, and 
driven it to exile, so that now a case of scurvy is 
rarely seen on board a well-kept ship. At one of 
the islands, natives stole one of his boats, so he 
gave the group a name which still sticks, — " La- 
drones," or Robber Islands. Not correctly informed 



AMERICA RECEIVES ITS NAME. 125 

as to the position of the Moluccas, his ships kept 
too far north; but on March i6, 1521, he discov- 
ered Samar, one of the group of islands named — 
though not till some years later — after Philip II. 
of Spain, and called " Philippines." The chief of 
one island was very hospitable, and, as the Span- 
iards thought, formally accepted allegiance to 
Spain ; but at Mactan Island the natives were hos- 
tile, and in his attack upon them, April 27, 1521, 
the commander and eight of his men were killed. 

Magellan could afford to die. He had discovered 
the southwest passage to China. The voyage, how- 
ever, w^as continued, and one of the ships reached 
Spain. The captain was honored by the King 
with a coat of arms, on which was a globe, with 
the motto, " You first sailed round Me." A Span- 
ish expedition under Villalobos was soon after- 
wards sent out, and took possession of the islands 
so wonderfully rich in timber, metals, gums, and 
spices. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

EL DORADO, OR THE GILDED CHIEFTAIN. 

AS with the discoveries of Cabot and the Norse- 
men, so with Magellan's. The importance of 
his voyaging was not at first recognized. The mind 
of Europe was bent on finding the direct passage 
to the old gold and spice lands of Asia, while 
America was ever the undesirable obstacle in the 
way. For eighty years or more to come, men kept 
on trying to drive their ships through this barrier, 
hoping to find some river, bay, strait, or other water 
passage through America in order to reach Japan 
and China. Nevertheless, geographers began to 
divide the Indies, to distinguish between the "East" 
and the "West" Indies. 

One thing healed the smart of the Spaniards' dis- 
appointment, while it kept them from making any 
further important explorations in North America. 
This was the discovery of mines of gold and silver 
in Mexico and Peru, to2:ether with the treasures 
won by seizure. Nevertheless, in time the great 
thought and practical achievement of Magellan 
bore fruit. He had given the first distinct knowl- 

126 



EL DORADO, OR THE GILDED CHIEFTAIN. 12/ 

edge of the Pacific. As the Spaniards had dis- 
covered the Phihppines, which were far enough 
around the world to be reckoned outside of the 
Portuguese claim, Villalobos and his men soon col- 
onized them. 

This group of over four hundred islands, between 
Formosa and the Moluccas, forming the northern 
part of the Malay Archipelago, with an area of one 
hundred and fifteen thousand square miles, an ex- 
ceedingly fertile soil rich in products both natural 
and cultivated, without dangers of wild beasts, and 
valuable in every way, became the rich treasure 
house of the King of Spain in the far East, while 
Peru and Mexico remained his inexhaustible store- 
house in the West. 

The Spaniards in America had little taste for 
work, but much for adventure. Most of them pre- 
ferred robbery to earning an honest living. They 
did not even care to mine the precious metals, but 
chose rather to roam over the continent and to lay 
their hands on gold wherever it had been already 
stored up. 

Once, an American popular lecturer went to Great 
Britain for pounds, shillings, and pence. " How 
strange," said Sandy, Taffy, and John, — one and 
all, — " we thought America was the place to make 
money." " True," replied the lecturer ; " but here 
it is made already." 



128 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

So with the Spaniards, they wanted gold ah'eady 
dug and refined. Furthermore, they hid their pur- 
pose under the garb of rehgion. It is a curious 
fact, also, that South America was explored and its 
geography gradually learned because the Spaniards 
kept chasing phantoms and echoes. The myth of 
the El Dorado lured them on. What was this 1 

In Venezuela, or Little Venice, there are many 
lakes, in each of which the Indians thought that a 
god dwelt who must be worshipped with offerings of 
gold or precious stones. Herein they were like the 
old Japanese, who believed in the Queen of the 
World and her palaces under the sea. On the top 
of a little mountain near Santa Fe, was one lake, 
at the bottom of which there lived a goddess, in 
whose honor a wonderful ceremony had been ob- 
served from times long before the coming of the 
Spaniards, and until about 1490. It was this: 
Whenever a new war-chief was chosen, there was 
a great parade of the warriors to the lake. In front 
walked a band of mourners, who were naked men 
painted red. These were followed by others, richly 
decorated with gold and emeralds, with feather 
crowns or with jaguars' skins. Their music was 
made with horns, pipes, and conch shells. The 
priests wore tall black caps and black robes marked 
with white crosses. The elders, nobles, and higher 
priests carried the newly chosen chief, the gilded 



EL DORADO, OR THE GILDED CHIEFTALN. 1 29 

man, on a platform hung with sheets of gold. This 
living man was clothed with pure gold. His body 
had been first smeared all over with resinous gum, 
and then fine gold dust was powdered over him, 
until, from crown to sole, he was shining like a 
golden statue. 

The procession halted at the w^ater's edge. Then 
the chief and his bearers stepped upon a raft, and in 
the presence of thousands of spectators pushed put 
to the middle of the lake. There the chieftain 
plunged into the water and washed off his covering 
of gold, while his tribesmen threw in the gems and 
jewellery they had brought with them. Dancing 
and music closed the exercises of the day. All this 
was meant as an offering to propitiate the goddess 
that dwelt in the lake. 

This ceremony was of the same nature as the 
offerings made by the Iroquois Indians, when pass- 
ing Rock Regio or Split Rock in Lake Champlain, 
where Arendt van Curler was drowned. Only, the 
northern savages threw in tobacco, a pipe, or some 
similar gifts to placate the god residing there. Per- 
haps gold dust was of no more value to the native 
Venezuelans of a.d. 1490 than was tobacco to the 
Mohawks. 

In digging for drains in Venezuela, men have 
found, besides other interesting metallic relics, a 
group of ten golden human figures representing 



K 



130 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the raft with the gilded chief and his compan- 
ions. 

When the Spaniards first heard the story of the 
chieftain clothed in gold, — el homb re dorado^ -^'^ it 
is in Spanish, — they were too late. It was " the 
day after the fair." The Muysca Indians near 
Bogota having conquered the tribe whose chief was 
the El Dorado, or the gilded, the ceremony had 
ceased twenty years or more before white men 
heard the story. 

When the fact died, the myth was born, even as 
the western clouds take on their most ororo^eous 
colors after the sun has set. Nevertheless, for 
nearly a hundred years, the myth survived the 
reality on which it had been founded. The Span- 
iards and the Germans went all over the northern 
half of South America, searching for the phantom, 
which was not laid until the Germans Von Hum- 
boldt and Schomburgh and Bandelier, in our cen- 
tury, showed the beginning and growth of the 
delusion. 

Both stories — that of the Grand Khan and that 
of the Gilded Chieftain — had already changed from 
fact to fiction, from history to mythology, when the 
Italians and Spaniards began to chase them. The 
"dead fact stranded on the shores of the oblivious 
years " was like the coal tar which, in its decompo- 
sition turns into gorgeous aniline colors, and tints 



EL DORADO, OR THE GILDED CIIIEETAIN. 131 

the river current with iridian splendors. Neverthe- 
less, because of this lust for gold and the spirit of 
adventure, the new continent was opened on all 
sides. 

Not at first, but in due time, the Strait of Magel- 
lan became a practical highway. Commerce be- 
tween Mexico and the Philippines developed. The 
Japanese Christians, who had come under direction 
of their new Spanish missionary teachers, to visit 
Europe to declare themselves spiritual vassals of 
the Holy See at Rome, to do obeisance to the 
King of Spain, and to leave splendid gifts of armor 
and W'Capons at Madrid, sailed by w^ay of the Pacific 
and crossed through Mexico. Returning home, 
these Japanese had gone entirely around the globe. 
In a very large sense of the word, the sovereign of 
Spain was " King of the Indies." 

Here, in our story of achievement, which eventu- 
ated in the settlement and appearance in history of 
the United States of America, practically ends the 
history of the Spanish discoveries in American 
coasts and waters, so far as we are directly con- 
cerned. The Portuguese colonized Brazil, and the 
Spaniards discovered and occupied the other por- 
tions of South America, as well as most of the 
West India Islands, Central America, and Florida. 
The Confederacies of Indian tribes in Mexico and 
Peru were conquered, and those countries were 



132 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

made Spanish provinces from which poured silver 
rivers into the treasury at Madrid. As many prov- 
inces were added by Cortez to the reahn of the 
Emperor Charles V., as his father had had cities. 

The Spaniards also made persistent and impor- 
tant explorations in what is now the southern part 
of our country, especially in the Cotton States, from 
Florida to the Mississippi, and in the southwestern 
regions from Texas to California. We shall glance 
at these later. 

Though not evident to the world at the time, 
when one of Magellan's squadron circumnavigated 
the globe, it is now clear in the perspective of his- 
tory that some Power had determined that America 
in the North Temperate Zone, its best portion as to 
climate, fertility, mineral wealth, and natural high- 
ways, was to be occupied and dominated by other 
than the Latin races. Italy owned not a foot of 
soil. Portugal had only sub-tropical Brazil. Spain 
held, drained, and looted lower North America, 
Central America, and most of South America. It 
was reserved for the northern nations of Europe 
only partially to discover and to explore, but wholly 
to occupy and colonize the territory now compris- 
ing the United States of America. 

When America had been known as a continent, 
and the world first circumnavigated, there was little 
sign that the English, Dutch, or Scandinavian would 



EL DORADO, OR THE GILDED CHIEFTAIN. 1 33 

launch out into the deep, or sail their ships beyond 
si""ht of land. It was the Reformation that orave 
England her sea power and Holland her eastern 
empire, and which made America the nobler theatre 
of the enterprise and faith of the Teutonic peoples. 
The Japanese Yoshitsune, the Mongols, and the 
Turks, by pushing westward, not only sent the 
southern nations of Christendom out on the sea in 
quest of lands beyond the Atlantic, but, by driving 
the Greek scholars with the Greek New Testament 
among Germanic nations, helped unconsciously the 
Reformation, the Dutch Republic, English sea- 
power, and the United States of America. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE FRENCH AMONG THE CODFISH AND THE WHALES. 

FRANCE Is one of the maritime European na- 
tions that has a large ocean front and a coast 
population which, from ancient times, has been 
daring upon the sea. While her southern neigh- 
bors were inquiring about new routes to those 
sunny Oriental lands where French crusaders had 
won immortal fame, the French could not remain 
indifferent. Every man of public spirit in southern 
Europe seemed to be talking of new sea-routes to 
the gold and spice lands. Being a people strongly 
inclined to Latin Christianity, the French needed 
fish dinners, at least three days in a week, and their 
sailors went far and wide to find the material. 

When King Francis I. heard how the Pope had 
carved the world in half, for only two nations living 
in one peninsula, he demanded to see Father Adam s 
will. He doubted the right of an Italian prince to 
dispose of so much of the universe by means of a 
bull. When the bold fisherman of St. Malo sailed 
far to the west, and, quite probably, fished off the 
banks of Newfoundland, the King was glad to hear 

134 



FRENCH AMONG THE CODFISH AND WHALES. 1 35 

reports about a possible New France towards the 
setting sun. 

Yet, it is not probable that any French national 
ship with a French commander saw the North 
American continent until after an Italian navigator 
from Florence came in person and interested the 
French King and Court in his plans for a voyage 
westward. Verrazano, as his name was, had trav- 
elled in Greece and Syria, making money in the 
spice and silk trade. When forced by Turkish 
successes to look elsewhere, he did so. He took 
the advice which old Italians then frequently 
gave to their juniors, — "Go west, young man." 
He entered the French naval service in 1505, when 
twenty-five years old. Twelve years afterwards, he 
sailed to the East Indies in a Portuguese vessel, be- 
coming an expert navigator. Again, in a French 
privateer, he w^aylaid Spanish ships coming from 
the West Indies, capturing one in 1523, which con- 
tained the spoils which Cortez had taken from 
Montezuma in Mexico. After that, he thought he 
should like to see the silver continent for himself. 

The next year, 1524, he went out on a voyage of 
exploration to North America, making landfall near 
Cape Fear. He sailed northward along the coast, 
discovering a bay which was either that of New 
York or Narragansett. Then going four hundred 
and fifty miles northeast, to latitude 50°, he returned 



136 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

to France. From Dieppe, July 19, 1524, he wrote 
to the King, claiming to have discovered over two 
thousand miles of a new coast. Once again, he got 
already to sail over the Atlantic either as a mer- 
chant to the Indies, or as a corsair for the pillage 
of Spanish vessels, but his career closed inglori- 
ously. He was captured on the southern coast of 
Spain and was put to death as a pirate. 

Indeed, not a few of the first discoverers, now so 
famous, suffered similar varieties of fate. They 
were thrown into prison, kept in chains, or had 
their heads cut off. Instead of winning gold, 
princes' favors, glory, and honor, they found them- 
selves and their children disgraced. Frequently in 
those days, between discoverers and explorers and 
pirates and sea-rovers, there was but a thin, some- 
times invisible, line of difference. 

It seems astonishing, in our day, that with so 
many famous names, as those of John Cabot, Ver- 
razano, and others, we find so little written or 
printed evidence of their work. Yet there seems 
little doubt but that this Venetian made such a 
voyage, and that he discovered new coasts in 
America. His fame rests upon a publication of 
Ramusio, who was the secretary of the senate in 
Venice. Besides publishing Verrazano's letter in 
1556, and attempting to popularize in Italy his 
brother's fame as a discoverer, Ramusio may have 



FRENCH AMONG THE CODFISH AND WHALES. 1 37 

embellished the story, besides adding that Verra- 
zano made another voyage to America and was 
killed by the savages. Ramusio knew the Cabots, 
and was one of the first to collect and publish 
accounts of voyages and travels. 

Thus it would seem that the first of French dis- 
coveries in America were made by another of those 
ubiquitous Italians in foreign employ. The Italians 
then led the world in nautical science and in daring 
on the sea. 

Nevertheless, Verrazano's discoveries had no 
more immediate practical importance among the 
French than had those of the Cabots among the 
English, until Jacques Cartier entered the river St. 
Lawrence and beo^an New France. Cartier was 
born in that little fishing-village named St. Malo, 
the fortified seaport town on the English Channel, 
near the mouth of the Ranee River, from which 
brave adventurous fishermen had probably sailed, 
even before his time, to the fishing-banks off New- 
foundland. Like their English brethren of the 
sea, the brave sailors of St. Malo hated the Inquisi- 
tion and paid back the Spaniards in their own coin, 
when the latter were too zealous to reduce heretics 
to ashes. 

To this day thousands of French fishermen come 
to the Grand Banks to catch cod. Not infrequently 
their little boats are cut in two and sunk, by the 



138 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

ocean steamers that rush through the waters Hke 
railway trains. Crossing the Atlantic in September, 
1895, for the eighth time, I remember that our 
steamer made a detour in order to avoid a wreck 
which had been caused by collision. The gunwale 
of this sin2:le-masted smack had been stove in, but 
the stump of the mast remained. The seaweed 
had already gathered, and the hulk had become a 
" derelict." As our big ship got in her rear, I read 
through my glass, on the stern of the waterlogged 
wreck, "Jacinth, Saint Malo." 

Cartier was born on the last day of 1594, and fol- 
lowed the sea from boyhood. Like many other 
young men of his century, he hoped some day to 
find the western passage to China. When the war 
between Spain and France was over, and the priva- 
teers had to seek new employment, Cartier was 
given two ships, of fifty tons each, and 162 picked 
men. Leaving St. Malo April 20, 1534, he sailed 
straight across the ocean. He sighted the head- 
lands of Newfoundland on May loth, meeting 
storms, floating ice, white bears, and wild fowls, 
seemingly as numerous as snowflakes in a winter's 
storm. His men explored the island coasts, and 
straits, and landing, they set up a cross. At one 
place they found a French ship from Brest. This 
was not surprising, for at various points these coasts 
had been visited by the Norsemen, by Cabot, by 



'"~l 




CARTIER SETS UP A CROSS IN NEWFOUNDLAND. 



FRENCH AMONG THE CODFISH AND WHALES. 139 

Cortereal the Portuguese, by Basque whalers, and 
by fishermen from Brittany. Probably hundreds of 
vessels had been off the banks for fish before Cartier 
came. 

They thought that Labrador, which the Norse- 
men had named the country of slate or rock, was 
the land of Nod, to which Cain had been banished, 
and indeed the natives whom they met seemed to 
have Cain's bad manners. The red man's opinions 
of the Frenchmen are not given. They kept on 
amid mists and storms, examining the archipelago, 
and sprinkling the names of the saints very fre- 
quently upon promontories and harbors. Not till 
the last day in June did they reach the mainland. 
The Micmac Indians came around the ship in such 
numbers that Cartier was obliged to fire blank car- 
tridges out of his cannon to scare them away. The 
next day he landed, and pleased their chief with the 
present of a red hat. He met other Indians, but 
having no provisions to spare, could not safely stay 
longer. He turned his prows homeward August 15, 
having two Indians on board. On this voyage he 
found neither the mouth of the St. Lawrence River 
nor the route to Japan. His Indians, with their 
curious costumes, and hair done up like a bundle 
of hay, with feathers sticking in the mass, made a 
great sensation in France. They certainly helped 
to stir up interest in further explorations. 



140 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

The next year, the King, wishing to see more of 
his new subjects, and to hear of new reahns, gave 
Cartier three ships in which to seek further for some 
waterway across America to spice lands ; but the 
St. Malo sailors, not caring to venture again where 
they found only icebergs, white bears, birds, codfish, 
and red savages, were slow in signing articles. They 
thought the whole scheme was wild, and Cartier a 
dreamer. So Cartier had to man his ships with 
pardoned criminals, though some very good sailors 
went with him. During July and August he met 
with the same stormy weather as before, and was 
totally discouraged in not finding a passage through 
to the Pacific Ocean. Two Indians told him that 
the strait between Anticosti and Salvador, which 
he had named St. Peter's Channel, led to a river 
which narrowed inland and became shallow, besides 
having rapids. This river, they said, was the en- 
trance to Canada. 

When, on August i8, Cartier saw many whales 
driving westward, he being too full of the Chinese 
idea to believe the Indians, ordered the ships to 
move west. Soon he came to water that was first 
brackish and then fresh. Nevertheless, having China 
on the brain, he thought that even fresh water 
might lead to regions of spice and silk. Soon he 
came into the broad river, passed the Saguenay, 
and in mid-September reached the site of Quebec. 



FRENCH AMONG THE CODFISH AND WHALES. 141 

Canada, ever rich in forests, was then lovely with 
the colors of the frost-touchecl leaves, and seemed 
almost like heaven to the weary Frenchman. How 
the country got its name is still a puzzle. Some 
say the gold-seeking Spaniards had seen the coun- 
try and cried out in disgust, " Aca ! nada " — " Noth- 
ins: there." Others derive the name from the 
Iroquois word kamiata, meaning a collection of 
huts or a village. 

The new-comers made friends with the Indians, 
who gathered in thousands to see the ships ; but 
Donnacona, then chief, not liking Cartier's proposed 
exploration of the river, tried to frighten the white 
men away with the antics of some of his tribesmen 
dressed like imps. These, he said, were messengers 
from the god that dwelt farther up the river and 
who did not like strangers. At such painted and 
tricked-out demons, Cartier, who was familiar with 
European painted and sculptured devils, was only 
amused. With a party of men he went on his way, 
exploring the river as far as the rapids. Landing 
at one point, Cartier and his party climbed the high 
ground, enjoyed the splendid view, and called the 
name of the place Montreal, the royal hill. King's 
Mountain. After an astonishing amount of reli- 
gious ceremonies, the white men ended with theft 
and treachery. It was a slave-catching and a slave- 
stealing age, when neither English, Spanish, Dutch, 



142 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

nor French had any conscience about burning men 
for holding different rehgious opinions, depriving 
dark-skinned men of their Hberty, or of kilHng 
" infidels," and Cartier seized and carried off several 
of the Indian leaders, including Donnacona. 

After a winter spent at the harbor of the Holy 
Cross, with much suffering from scurvy, of which they 
were cured by drinking decoctions of the leaves and 
bark of the white pine, the Frenchmen returned to 
St. Malo, July i, 1536. The King was delighted to 
see his new subjects, to hear of Cartier's success, 
and to learn of the great river St. Lawrence. Noth- 
ing, however, was done until 1541, when Cartier 
sailed again with Roberval and five ships. This 
time, having encountered weather even more stormy 
than before, little was accomplished beyond explor- 
ing the rapids above Montreal. When he got 
home, his king knighted Cartier. From this time 
forth, fleets of French fishing-vessels crossed the 
Atlantic regularly, and Portuguese, Spanish, and 
French vessels brought thousands of tons of cod 
for Friday food to Europe. 

France had now solid ground for claims upon, 
and further occupation of, America. Nevertheless, 
there were no immediate movements towards 
Canada. The French were soon after disturbed by 
internal dissensions and wars for the freedom of 
conscience. Catherine de Medici, who was the real 



FRENCH AMONG THE CODFISH AND WHALES. 1 43 

ruler of the kingdom during the reign of her three 
sons, did not care to spend her resources or attempt 
to get new revenues in the scarcely known regions 
beyond the Atlantic. 

Aside from some minor enterprises and failures 
in Canada, the only French attempts during the 
sixteenth century to colonize any part of North 
America were made during the struggle of the 
Huguenots for freedom in religion. By the advice 
of Admiral Coligny, Jean RibaUt took out twenty 
or thirty settlers and built a little log fort at Port 
Royal, in what is now South Carolina. Finding 
grapes plentiful, they gathered and pressed them, 
making about twenty hogsheads of wine ; but in 
that lonesome land, between the forest wilderness 
and the sea, when winter came on, they nearly died 
of homesickness. Resolving to return home, they 
built a rude boat out of green timber, for which 
they made sails and rigging from their bed-clothes 
and clothing, and then turned their prow eastward. 
Wonderful to relate, they were seen by a ship, 
picked up, and taken to England. 

A second expedition was sent out the next year, 
1564, under Laudonniere. This time the French 
built a fort further south, on the St. John's River, 
in Florida, where, after a while, they were rein- 
forced by Jean Ribaut, who came with seven ships 
and three hundred men. These Huguenot settle- 



144 ^^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

ments represented the efforts of Admiral Coligny 
and his fellow-patriots to found a French Protes- 
tant state in America. 

How real the Pope's division of the world was 
then held to be, and how terrible it then was to 
break his command, Coligny and Ribaut soon dis- 
covered. The King of Spain sent one of his 
bravest officers, Pedro Menendez, to uproot the 
settlement. The Spaniard arrived with a great 
fleet and force. "By a clever ambuscade he sur- 
prised the French garrison, captured the women 
and children alive, and massacred the men found in 
the fort. He then induced Ribaut, whose fleet had 
been nearly ruined by storms, with three hundred 
of his followers, who were almost starved, to sur- 
render on the promise of protection. The prisoners 
were then marched off to the Spanish settlements 
in Florida, near St. Augustine, and there were all 
deliberately shot in cold blood, for in those days 
Spaniards did not keep faith with men called 
heretics. 

The King of France, being a true follower of 
the Pope, paid no attention either to this insult to 
his flag or to the massacre of his subjects, but 
a French nobleman named de Gourgues, at his 
own expense, sailed with ships and men to Florida 
to take revenge. He surprised and captured the 
Spanish garrison, and hanged every one of the 



FRENCH AMONG THE CODFISH AND WHALES. 145 

prisoners, putting above each an inscription on a 
board, " Not Spaniards, but Assassins." Unable 
with his force to attack St. Augustine, he sailed 
away, and the Spaniards were left in possession of 
the country. 

How far away seem these days, when human 
heinous killed each other in the name of Christ and 
thought they were doing God service ! But slowly 
have men learned that the Almighty is not honored 
by those who cloak their murderous passions under 
the name of religion. All churches were then po- 
litical, and therefore persecuted those who held the 
doctrine of the separation of Church and State, now 
the law of the United States of America. Yet al- 
ready in Europe, from Switzerland to England, the 
believers in the right of Christians to govern them- 
selves without politicians, native or foreign, were 
sowing the seed of those truths which have become 
flower and fruit in the Constitution and laws of the 
United States. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE LAND OF FLOWERS AND THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. 

LIKE the horns of the crescent enclosing the old 
moon, the United States projects far south 
around the Gulf of Mexico. On the west is the 
southern boundary of Texas, and the warm water 
is salt until it touches the fresh flood of the Rio 
Grande. On the east there projects southward, 
Florida, a land reared for the most part out of the 
ocean by coral insects, yet with its highlands and 
orange plantations, its coquina or shell-rock, and its 
Evero-lades. In both of these southern extremities 
of our country there are many Spanish names, 
among which those of the saints abound. From 
the frequent references to dogmas and mysteries of 
the Christian faith in French and Spanish names, 
one would imagine that the people of these coun- 
tries were religious above all others, but this does 
not follow. 

St. Augustine, the oldest town in the United 
States, was founded by the Spaniards. Florida and 
all the land in what is now the Cotton States, as far 
west as the Mississippi, were first explored by men 

146 



LAND OF FLOWERS AND FOUNTALN OF YOUTLI. 147 

of Castile and Aragon. The whole country across 
to California was traversed by heroes from the same 
kingdom, whose names, whose blood, whose archi- 
tecture and reliction still attest their couraee and 
enterprise and show how deeply they have made 
their mark upon the history of our country. 

Florida is the first of the states of our Union 
that was ever seen by a European. It was visited 
as one would visit a fairyland, to find the pot of gold 
under the rainbow, or the golden fleece before the 
dragon's shrine. Herein we see mental differences 
between the southern and the northern nations of 
Europe. The former are more romantic. They act 
oftener upon ideas alone. The northern peoples 
are more practical and prosaic. The Spaniards, in 
many instances, went to America under dreamy 
delusions and with chivalrous ideas, chasing myths 
and shadows. Their brains were full of old-world 
notions and fairy tales, which they tried to realize 
on this side of the Atlantic. No wonder they laid 
themselves open to the wit and sarcasm of Cervan- 
tes, who poked fun at the hare-brained knights 
charging at windmills when other objects of attack 
were absent, The Spaniards explored America not 
only for gold but to realize all sorts of fancies that 
now belong to fairyland and the Arabian Nights. 
The more practical Englishmen and Dutchmen 
cared next to nothing about the new continent in 



148 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the west, until they saw there was good soil, fish, 
mines, and money in it, and opportunity to make 
fortunes. 

There was no more strange quest in Teutonic or 
Japanese fairy world than was that of the gray- 
bearded knight of Aragon, who had heard of a 
miraculous fountain whose waters would make old 
people young again. This was one of those won- 
derful myths of the middle ages, which came from 
the far East, and thence through the Moors to 
Europe, and which the Spaniards really brought 
with them across the sea. In the new world they 
tried to see what their eyes were looking for. They 
had expected to find that part of the old world, 
which is as wonderful in its myths as in its reali- 
ties, — China and Japan. For a hundred years after 
Columbus, they never thought of any " new " world 
although they were actually in it. They brought 
with them the Chinese and Arabic notions of 
alchemy, the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, 
the fountain of youth, the Amazons, the odd notions 
of Chinese Tauism, and the myth of the Seven 
Cities. To these they added new American myths, 
like that of The Gilded Man, which not for hun- 
dreds of years were entirely given up. Even yet, 
lingering among the uneducated, we catch glimpses 
of their ghosts in old romances, in gypsy lore, in 
almanacs, and in fortune-tellers' advertisements. Yet 



LAND OF FLOWERS AND FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. 149 

these notions once moved thousands of men to cross 
the seas, traverse deserts, jungles, and swamps, and 
to starve and die in American forests. 

Ponce de Leon opened his eyes in Aragon, in 
1460. Of noble family, he grew up to be a soldier. 
He helped to wrest Granada from the Moors, and 
went with Columbus, in 1493, to found the city of 
Little Spain. At fifty years of age, he was made 
governor of Porto Rico. One day he heard, from a 
native, of an island to the northwest, called Dimini, 
which had a miraculous spring into which if an old 
man plunged, he would come out without wrinkles 
and gray hair, and be strong once more. This 
news set the old man's imagination on fire. He. 
became as eager for the plunge in the forest foun- 
tain, as was Don Quixote to charge the windmill. 

Receiving his sovereign's permission to investi- 
gate and settle Dimini, Ponce de Leon sailed in 
March, 15 13. He discovered some of the Bahama 
Islands, and in the lovely month of April, on Easter 
Sunday, he landed a few miles north of St. Augus- 
tine. Taking possession with great ceremony, he 
called the land Pascua Florida, or the Paschal 
Flowery Land, the first word being the Spanish for 
Pascal or Palm Sunday. Curiously enough, the 
China so long sought for by voyagers from Europe, 
is also called the Flowery Land, or, in Spanish La 
Florida. Ponce de Leon sailed down the coast 



I50 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

about two hundred miles, and then returned to his 
island. There he was kept busy for several years 
by those Indian wars, in which the aborigines were 
exterminated. At last, in 1521, he went again with 
three ships and with soldiers to conquer the new 
country, and get his baptism of youth. In attempt- 
ing to plant a colony, instead of finding a fountain 
of life he was met by hostile Indians, and so badly 
wounded that he died soon after reaching Cuba. 
The first flowers of Spanish history in Florida were 
those of nightshade rather than of amaranth. 

Florida, which meant to a Spaniard any and all 
land north of the Gulf of Mexico, having been dis- 
covered, the next step was to colonize it. For this 
purpose, the King of Spain sent out a splendid fleet 
of vessels wdth six hundred men, under the com- 
mand of de Narvaez. The treasurer was Cabeza 
de Vaca, of whom we shall hear again. He was 
born in the town of Xeres, of which " sherry " wine 
is the namesake, and he became the greatest of 
early American travellers. He was the Stanley of 
Darkest America, known in its interior less than we 
now know, in some respects at least, the planet Mars. 

Instead of landing on the east coast, the little 
army, reduced by mutiny to about four hundred 
men, reached a place near Tampa Bay, probably at 
Clearwater Harbor, on the west coast. Landing was 
effected on Good Friday, in the year 1528. While 



LAND OF FLOWERS AND FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. 15 1 

the soldiers marched inland and northward, the 
sailors in their fleet followed along the coast. 

The explorers met with misfortunes from the 
very first. Expecting to live off the land, the hun- 
gry men found no food, but everywhere encountered 
fiercely hostile Indians. Then began a long war. 
Out of every canebrake and from every swamp, 
sped the deadly arrows. 

In their wild fastnesses, the Florida savages, lov- 
ing their oozy lair, long defied the white man's 
prowess. During our century, these Seminoles 
ambuscaded Colonel Dade and his brave band of 
over one hundred men. Even yet the swamps of 
the Everglades are not fully explored. 

An advance in the hot weather in ancient Flor- 
ida must have been a friohtful task. Loaded down 
with their armor, weapons, and clumsy firearms, the 
Spaniards floundered about among the rivers, lakes, 
and swamps, making, with their gay dress and shin- 
ing breastplates and helmets, splendid targets for 
their foes. They were quickly decimated by the 
agate-tipped shafts of their unseen enemies, and by 
starvation. Worse than all was their lack of unity. 
Losing morals and discipline, one set plotted against 
the other. 

When they reached the coast, they were unable 
to find their ships. With tremendous labor, they 
built five miserable boats and sailed westward along 



152 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the coast line of the Gulf hoping to reach Mexico. 
Terrible storms swooped down upon them. The 
miserable craft were scattered and wrecked. The 
castaways found themselves on a strange shore 
beyond the mouth of the Mississippi River, with 
starvation facing them. In order to preserve life, 
they had to turn cannibals. The shores of the 
wretched island which they called Mai Hodo, or 
Misfortune Island, were inhabited by poorly fed 
savages who kept body and soul together with 
roots, berries, clams, and fish, from the sea, but 
who, nevertheless, treated the white men kindly. 
Without weapons or clothing, which had been lost 
in the water, the Spaniards spent the winter on the 
island. In the spring thirteen of the sixteen sur- 
vivors tried to escape, but were captured and all 
killed except three, who were kept as slaves. 

Of the great expedition there remained but four 
half-starved sick men, one of whom was the now 
famous Cabeza de Vaca, the first man to traverse 
the North American continent, as we shall see. 
His name means Cow- Head, but he had the brains 
of an unusually bright man. In the Norse mythol- 
ogy, the cow was the primal animal of creation, 
and the cow's head at the prow of the Norseman's 
galley first pointed to the new world. So also this 
Spaniard, honorably named after the head of a cow, 
was, in a threefold sense, a remarkable man. He 



LAND OF FLOWERS AND FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. 1 53 

was the first pioneer who explored the whole south- 
ern part of the United States. He was the first 
American commercial traveller, the forerunner of 
the great and worthy host of to-day. He was the 
founder of the Cherokee theology, and told his 
savage friends the story of the creation, at which, 
two centuries later, the American missionaries in 
Georgia and the theologians at Andover were 
greatly puzzled, because Cherokee tradition so 
closely resembled the Hebrew narrative. 

We must not fors^et that these were the first 
Europeans to look upon the Mississippi ; for in 
their voyage westward, they had passed the great 
fresh water current which rushes into the Gulf of 
Mexico. Their Island of Misfortune was west of 
the great river, probably at Matagorda Bay, in 
Texas. At any rate, they were so far from Florida 
that they neither heard of the next explorer of 
Florida nor did he hear of them. 

Leaving Cabeza de Vaca for a while, we shall 
anticipate a little by continuing the story of the 
further exploration of Florida. 

The results of the great expedition had not been 
cheering. No doubt, in Spain, many a jibe was 
made at the flowery name first given to what proved 
to be a land of storms and disaster. Neverthe- 
less, there were young Spaniards ever ready to 
dare and to do for sovereign and country, especially 



154 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

when gold had been ah*eady so quickly gained else- 
where, and honors so quickly showered upon certain 
of their countrymen in other fields. One example, 
among many, of quick success was that of the 
Spanish student, Ferdinand de Soto, who, when 
but twenty-three years old, came to the new world. 
He was with Balboa in his discovery of the Pacific, 
and with Pizarro in Peru. Then he returned to 
Spain a wealthy man, with a name as well as a 
fortune, and was able to get for his wife the 
daughter of his noble friend who had helped him 
in the days of youth and poverty. When only 
forty years old, he was rich enough to lend money 
to the Emperor Charles V., but he longed for still 
greater glory. Hearing Cabeza de Vaca's story of 
the Zuni tribes of New Mexico, which lived in the 
cliffs, or, as the story came to him, in high houses 
of clay and stone, having door-posts lined with 
emeralds, he offered to equip a force at his own 
expense to win a new empire for Spain. He was 
appointed governor to Cuba with oversight also 
of Florida, which meant all the land north of the 
Gulf of Mexico, extending indefinitely northward 
and westward. 

Having the right of exploration, the young soldier 
called together a company of adventurous spirits 
and equipped them handsomely. In May, 1539, he 
landed at Tampa Bay with nearly nine hundred 



LAND OF FLOWERS AND FOUNT A LW OF YOUTH. 155 

men mostly in the prime of youth, in gayest dress 
and armor. They were furnished with playing- 
cards for games, priests and altars for religion, 
horses for the officers and cavalry, and a large 
drove of hogs for fresh food. It was as gay, as 
fanatical, as wicked a company as ever set foot on 
any shore. They came with mixed motives, to kill, 
enslave, and conquer in the name of God. They 
had bloodhounds and manacles for the natives, 
whom they intended to catch. They were as 
zealous as they were avaricious, confidently expect- 
ing to win, as Pizarro and Cortez had done, a new 
empire, rich in gold. 

Under splendid banners and crosses, which he 
had erected, and with dazzling ceremonies, de Soto 
consecrated the land to God and tlie King. It was 
now to be seen whether the man who had suc- 
ceeded so grandly in the South American high- 
lands could subdue the wilderness of a flat region, 
full of mud and malaria, and totally different in all 
its aspects from the mountains and forests of the 
southern continent. 

The march northward and westward was begun 
amid swamps and thickets. The hostile natives, the 
malarious climate, the new and strange diseases, and 
the constant danorer of huno^er was terrible, but to 
the end of his life, de Soto's men kept discipline 
and obeyed him. 



156 • THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

During their hunt for gold and for Indian treasure- 
cities, they met with many wonders. Two escaped 
Spanish captives joined them. They put the Indian 
slaves whom they kidnapped, in iron collars and 
chains, and made them grind corn and carry packs. 
In October the harbor of Pensacola was discovered, 
and word was sent to Cuba for supplies to be for- 
warded next year. Turning to the northeast, they 
crossed during March and April the rich plains and 
rivers of Georgia, passing through a region popu- 
lated by the ancestors of the now civilized tribes in 
the Indian Territory. In May they entered the 
Cherokee country. Fearing to cross the mountains, 
they wandered about in Alabama, reaching the large 
Indian town of Mobile near the middle of October. 
Here a great battle ensued, for the Indians, refusing 
to let these slave-makers occupy their houses, fought 
with splendid courage. Only after a desperate con- 
flict and repeated cavalry charges, did the white 
warriors with armor and sword, guns and horses, 
win costly victory over the men of the stone age. 
Of the Spanish horses, twelve were killed and 
seventy injured; of the men, eighteen were slain 
and one hundred and fifty had arrow wounds. In 
the burning town the Spaniards lost their baggage 
and trophies. Twenty-five hundred of the natives, 
it is recorded, were killed, burned, or suffocated. 

Only five hundred tattered men in rusty armor 



LAND OF FLOWERS AND FOUNT A LN OF YOUTH. 1 57 

now remained of the original nine hundred. March- 
ing north through the Chickasaw country, they seized 
the wigwams and corn of the Indians and spent the 
winter on the Yazoo River. In the spring, rather 
than furnish two hundred slaves to de Soto, the 
Indians set fire to the town, burning up many 
horses, hogs, and " Christians," besides clothing and 
weapons. The invaders expected now to be over- 
whelmed in an attack by great numbers, but the 
spirit of the half-naked whites rose to the emer- 
gency. The Spaniards were good blacksmiths and 
metal-workers. Within a week, at their forges, they 
had made new weapons or mended old ones, and 
were too well prepared to be safely meddled with by 
men having only clubs and stone-headed arrows. 
De Soto would not give up or turn back. Resum- 
ing the march, after a week's toiling through swamp 
and forest, they reached the muddy Mississippi, near 
what is now Memphis. 

The fear of men who wore steel hats and fought 
on horses, had preceded them, and a fleet of two 
hundred canoes filled with Indians, their chief in 
feathers and state dress, came down the river to 
offer presents of food, fish, and persimmon bread. 
The horses could not be got across the mile-wide 
river in bark canoes, which they would have 
swamped or kicked through, so the Spaniards had 
to build barges. 



158 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY, 

How strange it seems that two Spanish expedi- 
tions, each chasing the phantom of " the Seven Cities 
rich in gold," — an idea which they had in their 
brains before leaving Europe, — were within a few 
leagues of each other at this time, and were mutu- 
ally ignorant of each other's presence. In mid- 
summer, 1 541, Coronado, who from Mexico had 
traversed Arizona and New Mexico, and who, hav- 
ing: found that "the Seven Cities of Cibola" were 
only Indian villages with no gold, was seeking other 
gleaming phantoms among buffaloes and savages in 
central Kansas; while at the same time de Soto, 
on a similar hunt, was chasing brain spectres and 
piercing himself with many sorrows. They never 
met on earth to compare experiences, although both 
were in Arkansas. 

De Soto's party moved north into Missouri and 
up along the banks of the Father of Rivers. The 
Indians believed the white men to be gods who 
were able to heal the blind. The explorers enjoyed 
the bountiful crop of nuts, berries, and fruits of the 
land. At the northernmost point of their travels 
they spent a month, hearing of bisons, but not of 
any gold. Then they marched westward, spending 
the winter along the line of the Washita River, mur- 
dering, burning, mutilating, or enslaving the savages, 
as suited their whim, making a hell on earth in their 
rage and disappointment. 



LAND OF FLOWERS AND FOUNTALN OF YOUTH. 1 59 

Discouraged and melancholy, de Soto now again 
turned towards the Mississippi, where the tattered 
remnants of his host gathered round him, as he 
named his successor, May 20, 1542. The next day 
he breathed his last. Some priests were yet left in 
the company, and requiem mass was celebrated over 
his body. At midnight the corpse, wrapped up and 
weighted to sink, was dropped into the river. So 
perished the discoverer of the Mississippi, but it was 
very long before his widow in Cuba, whom he had 
left as a bride, heard of his melancholy end. Both 
Coronado and de Soto left home, wife, comforts, and 
fortune to hunt ghosts. 

Still in the hope of reaching wealth, and too 
proud to give up and return home poor, the surviv- 
ors wandered on westward toward Mexico and to 
the buffalo pastures and hunting-grounds of the 
Pawnees and Comanches; but, in despair, they 
again turned to the great river in December. Five 
months were spent in building seven undecked 
boats. Nails were made out of the chains and 
collars used on the Indian slaves. Hogs, horses, 
and game were killed and their flesh dried, the 
corn stores of the Indians were robbed, and barrels 
to hold fresh water were made. Then, with the 
rising flood they started down the river on their 
fresh and salt water journey to Mexico. In seven- 
teen days they had reached the Gulf. In about 



l6o THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY, 

forty days more the three hundred and nineteen 
survivors arrived at Panuca in Mexico, thus ending 
five years of suffering and of the infliction of suffer- 
ing on others. 

This was the first inland navigation of American 
waters by Europeans. De Soto's men had probably 
traversed the territory of no fewer than eleven or 
twelve of the states of our union, from Florida to 
Texas. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

A LONELY TRAMP ACROSS THE CONTINENT. 

IT is time now to tell of Cabeza de Vaca's most 
wonderful overland travels from Tampa Bay 
to the City of Mexico, and how his explorations pre- 
pared the way for the Spanish settlements and col- 
onies in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. 
Let us glance at his early history and see what kind 
of a man he was, and what strange vicissitudes he 
underwent. His full name was Alvar Nuiiez Cabeza 
de Vaca. His ancestors had won their family name 
two centuries before, in battle against the Moors. 
His grandfather had conquered the Canary Islands 
for the King of Spain. These islands, long before 
the time of Columbus and until the days of 
Raleigh's Virginia colonies, formed the far western 
limit of the old world. From the Canaries, which 
are still famous for their wines and song birds, 
most of the early exploring expeditions southward 
and westward sailed. 

At the Isle of Misfortune, as we remember, 
Cabeza de Vaca had been left behind, because too 
ill to walk, but he held on to life. As warm 

M l6l 



1 62 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

weather advanced, he recovered and actually won 
his way to the confidence of the Indians. After 
winning success as a pedestrian, merchant, and 
doctor among the natives, he at last reached Mexico 
and afterwards returned to his European home. 
He came back to America as Governor of Paraguay ; 
he failed and returned to Spain as a convict. He 
was kept in prison eight years, and when released 
lived at Seville until 1564. 

In 1542 Cabeza de Vaca produced the book 
which ofives us the first written account of the 
southern part of our great country. In this, he 
tells us, not only about himself, but also about the 
Indians. He describes their modes of life in war 
and peace, and their commerce. It was this devout 
Catholic who first taught the southern Indians the 
truths of the Christian religion. He was really the 
first missionary among them and learned their 
laneuaee. From him, the ancestors of the Chero- 
kees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and other civilized 
tribes learned about God and Christ and creation, 
and received an outline of the Bible story. He laid 
the foundations on which in later times other 
missionaries builded. He thus prepared the way 
for their success. From Cabeza de Vaca to the 
Cherokee Bible, and the Cherokee Indians of 
to-day, it is a long story of wrongs and sorrows, but 
also of progress. 



A LONELY TRAMP ACROSS THE CONTINENT 163 

How this Spaniard became a doctor and a mer- 
chant is told in his own book. Even when he was 
on Misfortune Island the Indians wished to make 
the white men physicians, but the proposition was 
received with hearty laughter. The Spaniards 
took the matter as a joke and thought the Indians 
were making fun of them, but the redskins were so 
much in earnest that they kept the white men 
hungry until they should yield and be obedient. 
The Indian theory was, that it was not necessary 
to know anything especially about roots or herbs, 
pills or tonics, but that as the sticks and stones and 
birds and beasts and reptiles had healing power, 
such strange creatures as white men must certainly 
be able to drive away diseases. 

Many of these Indians were very poor and mis- 
erable, having little to eat. Their life consisted 
chiefly in wandering from one place of food to 
another. As their white slave was too weak to 
draw a bow, to follow and trap animals, or to carry 
wood and water, even if they had allowed him to do 
that which was squaw's work, they let him wander 
about to find his own food, and go and come as 
he chose. Gradually, as his strength returned, he 
made long journeys up and down the coast. Soon 
he began to trade, acting as importer and exporter. 
He broudit sea-snails, corn, medicine, shells, sea- 
beads, and other things from among the coast 



164 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Indians and traded off his wares among the interior 
tribes for skins, red ochre, flints for arrow-heads, 
cement, reeds for arrow-shafts, and red-dyed tassels 
of deerskin. Everywhere the Indians treated him 
kindly and gave him food for his wares. As in the 
time of war the Indians of mutually hostile tribes 
could not themselves traffic, they were only too glad 
to have this neutral peddler carry on the business of 
a common carrier, which he did to his own profit. 
He was not only the first commercial traveller in 
North America, but was also the first white man 
who ever saw or heard of the bison or buffalo, and 
the first to describe what he called the "hunch-back 
cows." 

Gradually he learned from the medicine men the 
tricks of their profession. All over the world, sav- 
ages, who know nothing of the real causes and nature 
of disease, think that sickness and death come from 
spells or witchcraft caused by some enemy, or by 
being possessed of demons. Hence, the " medicine 
men " or wizards pretend by devilish tricks, noises, 
or by making themselves hideous, to frighten and 
drive out the imp or to neutralize the spell. Soon 
this lonely Spaniard had a great reputation as one 
who could suck out the poison, the imaginary stone 
or the thorn which made the trouble, for the mind- 
cure existed then as now. Instead of surgical instru- 
ments and pill-boxes, his chief aid in influencing 



A LONELY TRAMP ACROSS THE CONTINENT. 1 65 

patients was a rattle made of a dried bladder skin 
with beans inside. 

Once on a long journey, after having occasionally 
heard rumors of the presence of his countrymen, he 
wandered into Texas. There he found two Span- 
iards and a negro named Stephen, or Estevanico, 
and these four, naked and hungry, resolved to set 
out for Mexico. In August, 1535, they reached a 
tribe where each of the four practised medicine, so 
they quickly became men of renown and importance. 
They crossed Texas and went through the mod- 
ern Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora. 
Everywhere they stopped to heal the sick. Not con- 
tent with what they had learned from the Indians, 
they earnestly prayed to God for their patients. It 
is more than probable that after their departure 
these four strangers were themselves made into gods 
and their memory worshipped. At least, we may 
infer as much from what we know has happened in 
old Japan again and again. Indeed, pretty much 
the whole stock of heathen gods are only men w^ith 
posthumous reputation for powder. 

The travellers were agreeably surprised to find 
fields in which beans and pumpkins were cultivated, 
and that their red owners lived in houses made of 
timber and sod, like our " sod-shacks " in the new 
territories. The women w^ere decently dressed in 
cotton clothing, and even washed their clothes, using 



l66 ° THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

soap-root, which is still employed by our own Ind- 
ians and Mexicans. It was like a royal feast when 
they had cooked deer's hearts to eat during their 
three days' stay in one town. Then they met an 
Indian havino- on his necklace a horseshoe nail and 
the buckle of a sword belt, which he said he had 
Qfot from men with beards who had come from the 
sky and fought his people. This was their first 
sight in eight years of anything European. 

In Sinaloa, they heard of Spanish slave-catchers 
who had just left the place. After a hurried march, 
they overtook on the next day four Spaniards, to 
whom, though nearly overcome wdth emotion, they 
told their story, which seemed incredible. The Span- 
ish officers were not very hospitable to these sun- 
burned, savage-looking men of matted hair and 
tangled beard, who talked so excitedly, and the four 
survivors were abused in various ways ; but finally. 
May I, 1536, they reached Culiacan, and later the 
City of Mexico. They had now to train themselves 
to be white men in habits, and to eat the food and 
wear the clothes of civilization. 

In August, 1537, after a walk of probably over 
ten thousand miles, and having been the means of 
stimulating expeditions which opened Arizona and 
New Mexico to Spanish civilization, and our Indian 
Territory, Kansas, and Colorado to exploration, 
Cabeza de Vaca reached Spain. It was his accounts 



A LONELY TRAMP ACROSS THE CONTLNENT. 1 6/ 

of the countries he had traversed, and his reports of 
" the Seven Cities of Cibola, full of gold " of which 
he had heard, but had not seen, that started both 
Coronado and de Soto, the one from the east, and 
the other from the west, on their terrible marches. 
It was a double chase after the shadows of a fairy 
tale. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

CORONADO AND THE EXPLORATION OF NEW MEXICO. 

ONE name that ought never to be forgotten by 
Americans is that of Brother Mark, or Fray 
Marcus, who heard of the Seven Cities of Cibola 
from Cabeza de Vaca on his arrival in Mexico, and 
at once resolved to visit them. Brother Mark was 
another of that noble Italian band who, besides 
Cabot and Columbus, did so much to make Amer- 
ica known. He was born in that city of Nice, over 
which, in i860, the soldier Garibaldi's heart was 
nearly broken, because Count Cavour the states- 
man ceded it to France. Mark had come to Amer- 
ica with Pizarro in 1531. After his experiences in 
Peru he was in Guatemala and then came to 
Mexico. 

Ordered by his superior, not to needlessly expose 
his life to danger, he, in the spring of 1539, started 
with the black man Estevanico and a few Indians 
to walk the whole distance from the City of Mexico 
to Zuni land. Following the coast of the Southern 
Sea, as the Spaniards called the Pacific Ocean, until 
near Matape, he ordered the negro forward. He 

168 



CORONA DO AND EXPLORATION OF NEW MEXICO. 1 69 

told him to send back reports by Indian messen- 
gers, by means of large or small crosses on pieces 
of white wood, enlarging the marks according as 
the news was encouraging. 

Carrying his medicine rattle and making use of 
his powers as a wizard, this " Black Mexican," as 
the Zuni Indians still call him, made a wonderful 
impression and great progress, and finally reached 
the Zuni pueblos or towns. There he seems to have 
abused his privileges, by behaving rudely to the 
men and insulting the women, and was killed. Per- 
haps this was the first blood of an African negro 
shed on what is now United States soil. 

Brother Mark received very good tidings in the 
form of large cross-marks on white wood, until he 
got within sight of the Zuiii villages, where some 
hungry and tattered companions of black Stephen 
met him and told him the bad news. Mounting a 
hill from which he could overlook the promised 
land, Mark saw large houses several stories high in 
what seemed a city full of people dressed in cotton. 
He planted a cross on this prospect hill and then 
made a hasty retreat. 

Brother Mark saved his head by using his heels, 
as he had been ordered to do. Getting back into 
Mexico, he told so wonderful a story that he was 
considered the biggest liar Spain had thus far pro- 
duced. Like Mendez Pinto, who, when he talked 



I/O THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

of Japan, was set down as mcndacioics, and Marco 
Polo, who was called " Millioner " or exaggerator, so 
the good brother was at first quoted as an edifying 
but highly untrustworthy story-teller. In reality, 
his written report, as read to-day and confirmed by 
historical research, is wonderfully accurate. He 
said nothing of gold, but all Spaniards then imag- 
ined that where population and fertile soil existed, 
there must be gold in plenty. 

An expedition, quickly fitted out and with 
Brother Mark serving as land pilot, started for 
Zuiii. There they arrived in due time, but the 
friar had to leave the party on account of rheuma- 
tism. He came back to live in the City of Mexico, 
until 1558, when he died. Brother Mark was the 
discoverer of New Mexico. 

The exploring expedition by which New Mexico 
was made known, was commanded by Francisco 
Vasquez de Coronado, a governor of the Mexican 
province of New Galicia. He was a city-bred man, 
knowing little of frontier life, but was full of the 
idea of finding on land the " Seven Cities rich in 
gold," which John Cabot had tried to discover in the 
ocean. Coronado left behind him wife and home, 
fortune and comforts. At his own expense, he had 
equipped this expedition of three hundred Span- 
iards and eight hundred Indians, with a thousand 
spare or pack horses, many sheep and swine, and 



CORONADO AND EXPLORATION OF NEW MEXICO. I 'J I 

six small cannon, which cost him what would now 
be nearly a quarter of a million dollars, and he left 
home deeply in debt. 

It has been said that one reason why this band of 
new explorers had been so promptly raised and sent 
off, was because it was thought that they were leav- 
ing their country for their country's good. The 
little army was composed chiefly of young Span- 
iards who were too fond of clrawino- their swords 
and of engaging in other activities not popular in a 
settled community. They were not only sent away ; 
they were ordered not to come back, but remain as 
colonists. 

To shorten a long story, with a fleet by sea and 
a little army by land to aid him, Coronado and a 
picked guard of fifty horsemen went ahead quickly 
and reached Zuiii land early in July. Capturing 
the Indian town without difficulty, he sent parties 
to seize the villages of cliff-dwellers at Moqui, to the 
grand canon of Colorado, and to the Pueblo in 
northern New Mexico. Yet he found nothino- that 
corresponded to the fairy tales he had heard or 
thought he heard. 

During the winter Coronado, now reinforced, 
marched to the Rio Grande, among the Pecos tribes, 
where he heard of the Quivira, which he understood 
was a large city, full of pure gold. The man who, 
by signs, told him this story, was a captive Indian 



172 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

from the region of the buffaloes in Kansas. He 
had been taken prisoner by the Pecos when on a 
hunt and wanted to get back home. The Span- 
iards called him " the Turk," thinking he looked 
like one. 

Again lured by a new golden myth, Coronado 
and his men tramped across Texas, surviving awful 
dangers and hardships, and reaching far into the 
Indian Territory. On the great prairies, seeing 
nothing but the sky and buffaloes, they wandered 
round and round in a circle, losing their way. 
They ruthlessly slaughtered bulls and cows by the 
hundreds. They found only savages dressed in 
leather clothes and living in tents. 

By this time, believing himself to have been 
deceived, Coronado selected thirty men to go for- 
ward with him while the main body marched south- 
ward to the Rio Grande. He did not get to the 
Mississippi River, where he might have met de Soto 
and his band, and found his countrymen in like 
quest and plight with himself. With his thirty 
men, he went northward into Kansas and possibly 
Nebraska ; but, though he met the Ouivira Indians, 
he found them to be only buffalo-hunters living on 
the plains, and knowing nothing of the yellow metal. 

They first put " the Turk " in chains and then 
hanged him. It is very doubtful whether, until he 
saw the Spaniards, this savage knew what gold was. 



COKONADO AND EXPLORATION OF NEW MEXICO. 1 73 

During Coronado's absence in the northward, the 
other Spaniards, who had been left waiting, amused 
themselves by slaughtering the bisons, both bulls 
and cows, littering the plains with over five hun- 
dred carcasses. Many of these " hunch-backed " 
oxen were fierce and showed fight, killing several 
horses. The Spaniards enjoyed the sport as if they 
had been at home, where bull fights are still com- 
mon. They thus began the extinction of that herd 
of over five millions of beef-producing bisons ; 
which, in the northern pasture, was exterminated 
between the years of 1871 and 1875, the southern 
portion being finally destroyed between 1881 and 
1883. The cow-boy and domestic cattle have, in 
this region, taken the place of Spaniard, Indian, and 
bison. 

So, after all, unable to found a colony, and poor 
and empty, Coronado and his men came home with 
no golden fleece, and shorn of nearly everything 
but life itself. Unwelcomed and undesired, Coro- 
nado and about one hundred followers reached the 
City of Mexico in midsummer, 1542. 

In our minds we usually associate the Spanish- 
American explorer with a horse, the animal which 
he introduced into the new world. Yet the Span- 
iard was more than a cavalier or centaur. Most of 
his greatest land explorations were made on foot. 
In bands and companies these searchers for gold, 



1/4 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

danger, and fame, overran not only the South 
American continent, but also Mexico, the whole re- 
gion of the present Cotton States, Texas, and the 
country west and southwest of Kansas and Colorado. 
Where there were no paths and often no water, 
grim and determined men in chase of phantoms, 
and missionaries eager to save souls, tramped. If 
Cabeza de Vaca walked his thousands, his country- 
man, Andres del Campo, walked his tens of thou- 
sands. The former, a refugee with his face and 
hope ever homeward, wrote a book and told his 
story. Between April, 1542, and 1550, Andres 
del Campo walked nearly nine years. He wrote 
no book, but he explored Colorado and Kansas, 
besides wandering to and fro in the great arid 
regions between these American states and Mexico. 
We shall see how it came about. 

The missionary zeal of the friars, and their love 
of souls, were even greater than the layman's love 
of gold. In the autumn of 1542, Brother Padilla 
led a little band into the newly explored regions. 
The company consisted of some Indian boys, two 
young men of Mexico named Lucas and Sebastian, 
and the soldier Andres del Campo, who was on 
horse, the others being on foot. They travelled 
over the dry lands, across Colorado and through 
Kansas, until they saw a cross which had been set 
up by Coronado in one of the Sioux Indian towns. 




BROTHER PADILLA FINDS THE CROSS SET UP BY CORONADO. 



COKONADO AND EXPLORA770N OF NEW MEXICO. I 75 

After laboring among the red men awhile, the friar 
decided to move to another tribe. On the first 
day's march out, some hostile savages in their war 
paint met them. The boys and horseman escaped, 
being urged by Brother Padilla to do so. The 
Indian archers made of the missionary a willing 
martyr, a St. Sebastian. He was shot to death 
wath arrows, according to the fashion of savages, 
who empty their quivers where one shaft would 
suffice. 

The full story of Andres del Campo and the 
young men Lucas and Sebastian, we do not know, 
except that they were captured by the Indians, 
made slaves, half-starved, and brutally treated. Yet, 
after eight years' wandering over the country from 
Kansas to Mexico, the three walked into Tampico, 
in 1550. 

It looked now as though New Spain, as Mexico 
was then called, would not be greatly enlarged, 
if at all, during the sixteenth century, while all 
idea of a permanent colony was for the time being 
abandoned. Nevertheless, as Spaniards do not 
readily yield, they did not give up hope. Further- 
more, it is not easy to dislodge the spectres of the 
brain. They brought to America from Europe 
old-world myths that are not yet utterly dead, and 
were then very much believed. 

We must not forget that one of Coronado's par- 



1/6 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

ties went by water. Hernando Alarcon sailed along 
the Pacific coast and up the Gulf of Old California. 
Unable to force his ships against the current of the 
Colorado River, he went up in two boats a distance 
of eighty leagues, finding houses and inhabitants. 
Very probably he reached a point as far north as 
the great bend where it turns off to the right and 
east, at the foot of a mountain range. There he 
heard of the death of a negro and the capture of 
the Zufii villages by the Spaniards. He thought it 
best not to undertake the land journey eastward, 
and so he returned to Mexico. He thus explored 
the Vermilion or Red Sea, as the Gulf of Old Cali- 
fornia was then called, and looked upon the soil of 
three of our United States, — California, Nevada, 
and Arizona. 

Thus inland California was seen on its western 
side from a river boat. Its seacoast was explored 
from the Pacific, three years later, by Juan Rod- 
rigues Cabrillo, a Portuguese in the Spanish service, 
who named Cape Mendoza, now Cape Mendocino, 
and the Farallone Islands. In 1592, a Spanish 
naviofator sailed as far north as British America, 

o 

entering and naming the strait of Juan de Fuca, 
which forms our national boundary between Van- 
couver's Island and Washington, — between British, 
and composite, or distinctive America. 

California was reexplored by the Spaniard Vis- 



CO RON ADO AND EXPLORATION OF NEW MEXICO. 1 77 

cano in 1602, but was not colonized until the Fran- 
ciscan fathers began their mission at San Diego in 
1 769. San Francisco, which has become the great- 
est city on the Pacific coast, was established in 1776, 
the year of our Independence, as the mission Do- 
lores. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the 
Spaniards were acquainted with the two Americas 
as one continent. From the Chesapeake Bay, dis- 
covered by Spanish navigators and named the Bay 
of Santa Maria, to the fortieth degree of latitude 
on the western coast, they know North America in 
outline. Thus far all attempts to get a foothold 
within the present waters of the United States had 
resulted in dismal failures for the Spaniards. Yet 
while there was still comparative peace in Europe, 
before the Dutch and English heretics had begun 
to make trouble for the lord of half the world, and 
there were plenty of young Spaniards who wanted 
adventure and more money, and were ready to seek 
both at whatever cost, and while the missionary 
spirit was still strong, it looked as if North America, 
like South America, might yet become New Spain. 

In 1560 Aviles de Menendez went to Florida, to 
establish there a little colony. He found a few 
French Huguenots on the ground, and these he 
promptly seized and hanged, "not as Frenchmen, 
but as heretics." He then built the town which he 
named after that greatest of all the African saints, the 

N 



178 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

mightiest of the church fathers who, among both 
Protestant and CathoHc theologians, is still so great 
a favorite ; for both the ultra- Montane Catholics and 
the rigid Calvinists honor his memory and imitate 
him in mind and ways. 

The city of St. Augustine bade fair to be a new 
Eternal City. Like the old saint's " City of God," 
it could not be destroyed. Though in 1560 the 
French nobleman de Gourges captured its three 
forts and hanged the colonists " not as Spaniards, 
but* as villains," and although in 1586 the Eng- 
lishman Sir Francis Drake destroyed the colony, — 
even as a dragon is supposed to swallow up the 
moon, — yet St. Augustine was at once defiantly re- 
built. It remained Spanish until 1763. 

When it became English, Florida was explored 
and described by the Dutchman Romaine, who 
afterwards entered the service of Congress, became 
an officer in the American army, built forts at West 
Point, wrote one good book on Florida, and another 
— the first ever printed in Hartford — justifying 
the American independence of Great Britain, and 
citing the example of the Dutch in revolting against 
Spain in 1667. The Spaniards introduced the 
orange into Florida, and the old stocks left by 
them have been, by grafting, made to produce those 
wonderful fruits — nature's bottles of wine — which 
excel all others in the world. Except, however, a 



CO RON A DO AND EXPLORATION OF NEW MEXICO. 1 79 

few remnants of architecture and names of places, 
the Spanish mark upon Florida has been slight 
indeed. 

By 1 58 1, the year in which the United States of 
Netherland published their Declaration of Inde- 
pendence to Spain, the ill-fortune of Coronado had 
faded from most minds. A new generation had 
grown up. Men, then nearly forty years of age, 
had been born since he had reentered Mexico with 
his tattered tramps. So again, some lion-hearted 
missionaries started on foot to reach Zuni. Tarry- 
ing to preach the Gospel, they were slain by the 
Indians. Only nine soldiers, their companions, 
succeeded in reexploring the country as far as 
Zuiii. 

Next year, further addition was made to geog- 
raphy by Antonio Edpejo, a rich Cordovan, who 
started with fourteen men into the desert. He 
marched up along the Rio Grande, and passed the 
site of Albuquerque, a town taking its name after 
one in Spain, but suggesting also the name of the 
famous Portuguese conqueror of Malacca and first 
European navigator of the entire Red Sea. He met 
with little or no opposition from the Indians. He 
then turned westward and explored the northern 
parts of Arizona, visiting at least ^mq, of the cities 
of the " Cliff Brothers," or the Pueblo Indians. 
Returning again to the Rio Grande River and the 



l8o THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Pecos Indians, he went down the stream named 
after them, into Texas, and thence got back to 
Santa Barbara. He expected to return the next 
year and colonize New Mexico. However, he died 
soon afterward, and left a noble record of explora- 
tion, but established no colony. 

Another who followed him, in 1590, was Gasper 
Casteno de Sousa. But having violated the require- 
ments of the royal governor, he was arrested and 
brought home a prisoner. 

The real colonizer of New Mexico was Juan de 
Onate, who founded the second oldest town in the 
United States, San Gabriel of the Spaniards, and 
also Santa Fe. Unlike Coronado and others who 
attempted to tame the wild and treeless wilderness, 
and to make the desert blossom as the rose, Onate 
was a native American frontiersman. Born in 
Mexico, he was thoroughly familiar with its moun- 
tains and deserts. He knew^ how to fight Indians, 
to find food and water, and to be patient and hope- 
ful amid discouragements. His parents had come 
from the old country, and his father had discovered 
the silver mines of Zacatecas, then the richest in 
the world. Yet, so far from being satisfied with 
mining silver, Onate wanted to win new lands for 
Spain. The government would not provide funds 
for any more expeditions. After so many costly 
failures, the country north of Mexico was then 



CORONA DO AND EXPLORATION OF NEW MEXICO. l8l 

regarded very much as most persons still look upon 
the Arctic regions, as a land in which there is noth- 
ing but disappointment and death. 

With such a menace of starvation and poverty, 
after having lost so many men and so much money, 
— especially while so many thousand Spanish sol- 
diers and so many ship-loads of Peruvian and Mex- 
ican silver were required to fight the little Dutch 
Republic, — the crown of Spain had early refused 
to send another man or to spend a fresh maravedi. 
So at great expense, Onate fitted out his own expe- 
dition. After many delays, and a refusal by the 
new viceroy even of permission to start, Onate set 
out in 1597. He had two hundred soldiers and as 
many colonists, among whom were women and 
children, besides tools and seed, sheep and cattle. 
Just north of where Santa Fe now stands he 
founded, in September, 1597, the town of St. 
Gabriel of the Spaniards. 

Not satisfied wdth this, after seeing his colonists 
well under way in their new life, he explored the 
country round about and far northward, and in 
1600 he reached Nebraska. Four years later he 
took thirty men and marched entirely across New 
Mexico and Arizona to the Gulf of California, 
returning safely to his colony in 1605, when he 
founded the city of the Holy Faith, or Santa Fe. 
The next year he again explored the regions to the 



1 82 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

northeast ; but of these, his last movements, we 
know very little, if anything. In 1608 he retired 
from the government of the new province. 

Thus, before a single English settlement had 
been successfully made in America, the whole of 
the southern part of the United States had been 
more or less explored by the Spaniards, who had 
also founded three cities. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

ENGLISH SLAVE-TRADERS AND BUCCANEERS. 

RELIGION has always had much to do with 
geography and exploration. Pilgrims to sacred 
shrines in far countries, w^iether the Chinese to 
India, the Hindoos to Arabia, or the Europeans to 
Palestine, have added first and most to knowledge 
of strange lands. In the sixteenth century, until the 
Dutchmen taught a contrary lesson, the religion of 
a country was regulated by the King. " Who owns 
the region, owns the religion," was a maxim. Under 
the system of the Pope and the Emperor, when the 
Church and the Empire governed all Europe, for a 
nation to change its religion meant war. People 
had not then learned toleration or freedom of con- 
science. 

The people of southern Europe had a curious 
idea in regard to the Reformation, for they thought 
it meant piracy. The first notion that many Span- 
iards and Italians had of a Protestant, was that he 
was a pirate. This was because as soon as the 
nations of northern Europe — French, Dutch, and 
Enelish — be^an to reform their faith and worship, 

183 



1 84 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

they and the Spaniards and Portuguese became ene- 
mies and immediately sailed out on the seas to 
capture each other's ships. For a long while there 
lingered in Spain and Italy this strange idea, that 
the Dutch and English had become Protestants 
simply because they could make themselves rich by 
robbing Spanish commerce. It was also believed 
that the only motive which brought the Protestant 
people to America was to secure Spanish gold and 
treasure. In this the Latin nations were not quite 
rieht, thouoh the Eno^lish and Dutch desire to 
defend themselves against the Spanish Giant Grim, 
who claimed half the world and kept the Inquisition 
ready to torture and burn all heretics, was a power- 
ful motive in colonizing America. 

Earlier than the discovery of America, and before 
Spanish commerce had been greatly developed, the 
Inquisition had been established in Spain, where 
Church and State were one. This Inquisition put 
to death a great number of Jews and Moors. Isa- 
bella, who aided Columbus, was one of the greatest 
upholders of the horrible system. Myriads of people 
were tortured in the most barbarous way, and tens of 
thousands more were burned to death. After all the 
Jews and Moors had been either incarcerated, incin- 
erated, exiled, or forced to say that they were Chris- 
tians, then the Inquisition was ready for new kinds 
of heretics. These were found plentifully among 



ENGLISH SLAVE-TRADERS AND BUCCANEERS. 1 85 

those who Hked to read the Bible in their own 
language and who had no use for Italian priests. 
Not content with haling Frenchmen, Spaniards, and 
Italians before the tribunals, the Spanish Inquisi- 
tion caught the English sailors found in Spain and 
imprisoned, tortured, and burned them. 

This made the English people hate the Inquisi- 
tion and determine to do Spain all the harm they 
could. Unable to accomplish very much on land, 
they resolved to damage the Spaniards on the seas. 
They learned how to build swifter ships, that would 
spread more sail, and move forward whether the 
wind was in the wake or in their teeth, answer- 
ing quickly to the helm. They made heavier and 
longer-ranged cannon. Pretty soon privateering 
became the rage. Men left commerce and the fish- 
eries to make money in this lively, exciting, and 
lucrative business. 

The English Jack did not care to declare war out- 
right against the Spanish giant. England was too 
poor and weak to openly defy the owner of America, 
and as yet it seemed still uncertain whether the 
little Protestant states would be able to hold their 
own. On the other hand, Spain had her hands full 
in trying to colonize a new continent and to put 
down the revolt in the Netherlands. Until he could 
crush the Dutch United States, Philip II. did not 
care to venture upon open war with Elizabeth. 



1 86 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Consequently, during two generations there was a 
tremendous amount of bloodshed and murder, piracy 
and burning of ships and towns on both sides. 
There were all the horrors and wickedness of war, 
without its honorable and redeeming features. 

Even the great Spanish Armada, which hoped to 
invade England and conquer it, was built and was 
sent in times of professed peace and without any 
declaration of war. This was the supreme effort of 
southern or papal Europe to put down the rights 
of conscience and freedom of thought in northern 
Europe. It was but one of several gigantic attempts 
which were' made by the Latin nations and civiliza- 
tion to crush the Teutonic spirit and overwhelm 
the Germanic nations. Whether in the case of 
Arminius and Varus in the ancient forests of Teu- 
toberg; at the Reformation; in the Dutch war of 
Independence; in the defeat of the Spanish Ar- 
mada ; in the Thirty Years War in Europe ; in the 
two centuries of struggle between the French and 
English for possession of the North American con- 
tinent ; or in the attempt of foreigners to make the 
United States a country ruled by priests and sol- 
diers, — the result was and will be ever the same. 
The Latin idea of the centralization of power over 
conscience and personal liberty will not work in 
America. 

It was the west country of England that for the 



ENGLISH SLAVE-TRADERS AND BUCCANEERS. 1 8/ 

most part, in the sixteenth century, produced deep- 
sea sailors and adventurous mariners and explorers. 
Those on the eastern and southeastern coast were 
chiefly petty traders, who rarely went out of sight 
of land. They trafficked in the North and Baltic 
seas and along the English Channel, but rarely 
sailed long out of sight of land. 

In the western counties, Bristol had sent John 
Cabot. Devon produced many men of the sea. 
Plymouth was the centre of vast enterprise. The 
size of the ships in those days was very small. 
They were more like our little coasting-vessels, 
yachts, or sail-boats. Anything with a hull as big 
as one of our ordinary Erie Canal boats would have 
been a wonder, in the age of King Henry VIII. 
Yet, whereas our canal boats, when loaded, rise 
very little above the water, the sixteenth century 
ships had great castles built above their decks from 
the middle to the stern. Often there was a tower 
or " forecastle," as the name still is, near the bow. 
The heavy wooden turrets of some of the old fight- 
ing ships looked much like those of steel on our 
modern battle ships. 

The opening of the Atlantic by the Spaniards 
revolutionized English seamanship and navigation, 
for long voyages required longer and larger ships. 
Henry VIII. first saw the importance of gunpow- 
der in war, and imported Italians to cast new styles 



1 88 THE ROMAXCE OF DISCOVERY. 

of heavier artillery, but the first English ships that 
came to America were armed with bows and arrows 
rather than with cannon and round shot. 

Columbus had offered the new world to Henry 
\'III. when he sent his brother with maps and 
globes, together with quotations from Plato and 
Aristotle, to prove that there was a pathway to 
China by sailing towards the setting sun ; but 
Henry could see no money in the venture, and 
thoueht the idea a wild dream. So America was 
found by the Spaniards and not by the English, 
and little thought came to Englishmen of coloniz- 
inor America. 

Something unexpected happened in England to 
turn the prows of her sailors across the Atlantic. 
This was the divorce, by Henry VHI., of his Span- 
ish wife, Catherine of Aragon, which made Henry 
the public enemy of papal Europe. The divorce 
seemed an insult to the Pope and to all people and 
nations that looked on this Italian prince as the 
vicar of God. Catherine was the daughter of Fer- 
dinand and Isabella, the friends of Columbus. If 
the mother, by sending the Genoese, had started 
Spanish colonization in trans-Atlantic regions, the 
daughter was the indirect means of despatching 
Englishmen to America. She had already married 
the oldest son of Henry VII. of England. In 1509, 
under an express dispensation of the Pope, she 



EXGLISH SLAVE-TRADERS AXD BUCCA.YEERS. 1 89 

became the wife of Henry \'III., who was six years 
younger than herself. Her only living child 
became Queen Mary, who married Philip H., and 
was such a persecutor that she was called Bloody 
IMarv. Some of the best churches now on Ens^lish 
soil are built on the old ash-heaps where her victims 
were burnt. 

Henry began to love Anna Boleyn, and wanted 
the Pope to divorce him from his Spanish Kate. 
The Pope declining, Henry divorced himself. In 
those days kings were a good deal more important 
than they are now. The people of northern Europe, 
and especially King Henry's countrymen, took up 
the quarrel and sided with him. At the Court of 
Rome, the focus of politics as well as religion, the 
English influence was foiled by the priests and 
lawyers from the land of the Bull-fight and the 
Inquisition, and Henry was excommunicated, but 
for this he cared not a fig. '' Bluff King Hal " had 
just the spirit and habits which his countiymen 
admire. He was a fighter and could defend himself. 

At once the English people became partisans for 
or against their king, and the modern political par- 
ties, the one the National, Liberal or Reforming, 
and the other, the Conser\'ative or Catholic party, 
besfan their historv. Henrv. beins; intenselv En^- 
lish, was very popular. When the Inquisition began 
to make more racks and buy more wood in order to 



190 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

burn alive King Henry's subjects, then English 
sailors longed to take their revenge on the seas. 
America was the treasure house of the Kincr of 
Spain, and they proposed to help themselves to his 
possessions. A tremendous zeal for exploration 
and discovery now broke out among sailors and 
landsmen in the British Isles, but it was not in the 
interests of science. Their object was the Spanish 
gold and silver beyond sea. 

One Thomas Stukely was a specimen explorer 
of the long line made famous by Hawkins and 
Drake. Having a pretext to settle an English col- 
ony in Florida, Stukely collected one hundred tall 
soldiers and set out from Plymouth in a ship of four 
hundred tons. When once out of harbor, Stukely 
said to his men, " The sea is my Florida," and 
started on a piratical expedition to loot the cargoes 
of plate ships from America. To this day, " plate," 
the tell-tale name for old silver and table service in 
England, points to the days when the chief source 
of plate vjdiS plala, or Spanish silver, not mined out 
of the ground, but found on the ocean. Stukely 
made Ireland his sally-port and base of supplies. 
Other privateers and corsairs chose the Scilly Isles 
as their headquarters. " The pirates of Penzance " 
in the sixteenth century figured not in a comic 
opera, but in reality. 

The man who opened for Englishmen the path 



ENGLISH SLAVE-TRADERS AND BUCCANEERS. 191 

to the West Indies, and, first in our English tongue, 
described Florida, was William Hawkins, the father 
of two more famous freebooters in as many gener- 
ations. He stuck to business and avoided politics. 
He saw that there was money in seizing and selling 
negroes. In 1530 he made a voyage to Guinea 
and opened that African slave trade which enriched 
England during three centuries. He sold his cap- 
tured flesh and blood to the Portuguese in South 
America. On his second voyage, having crossed 
the Atlantic, he brought back a savage Brazilian 
chief, who was a great curiosity in England. Haw- 
kins is known to have made three voyages to 
Guinea and Brazil. " Guinea gold " was by this 
time well known in Queen Elizabeth's realm. 

Thus began our ancestors' interest in strange 
peoples. From the first, the English were great 
kidnappers. They stole many natives, of various 
colors of cuticle, in order to show them in the 
counties at home. This was both to stir up interest 
in exploration schemes and to make money. At 
that time Moors, negroes, or men of reddish skin 
were a great curiosity. Their stone hatchets, bows 
and arrows, canoes and ornaments, seemed as won- 
derful as if brought from another planet. Later 
on, the North American Indians attracted great 
crowds. The London or Plymouth of that day 
were very different from these cities in our century. 



192 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

when people of all nations may be met on the 
streets. Shakespeare, in " The Tempest," speaks of 
"salvages and men of Indes " and of the "holiday 
fools," who will lay out ten Dutch farthings even 
" to see a dead Indian." Like father, like son. 
Where William Hawkins stole tens, his son John 
cauQ^ht and sold thousands of necfroes. 

With the intention of outdoing his father, Haw- 
kins the second left Plymouth in 1562 for the 
Canary Islands. Sailing down to Sierra Leone, 
he captured his first cargo of three hundred black 
men and carried them over to the town founded by 
Columbus, Hispaniola, which had already become 
the chief slave market of the new world. There, 
Hawkins sold his human cattle at a high profit. 
In return he brought home pearls, sugar, ginger, 
and the spices which our forefathers liked so much, 
besides some hides which he sent to Spain, then 
the greatest country in Europe for boots and shoes. 
Cordovan leather was everywhere famous, and the 
"cordwainer" of modern days is a cordovan out of 
Spain, — a shoemaker. 

On his second voyage Hawkins was not less of 
a trader, but more of an explorer. He had four 
ships and nearly two hundred men. They went 
first to Guinea, and then crossed the ocean, the 
holds of their ships packed tight with poor negroes. 
On the way over, their ships got into a calm, and for 



ENGLISH SLAVE-TRADERS AND BUCCANEERS. 193 

twenty-one days they could not move. The danger 
of their provisions running out was great, but in 
March they reached the Spanish slave markets and 
began selling their human freight. Hawkins made 
surveys of other islands in the West Indies, took 
soundings, studied the currents, made charts, and 
sailed along the coast of Florida, giving us the first 
description in our own language of the land which 
now forms our most southern state. 

Hawkins tells us about tobacco. He says that 
the Indians, when they travelled, had a kind of dry 
herb which they put into an earthen cup at the end 
of a cane. This they fired, sucking the smoke 
through the cane. This satisfied their hunger and 
helped them to go without meat or drink. Haw- 
kins helped the Huguenot colonists whom he met 
in Florida. He noticed that these Frenchmen, 
from a country of vineyards, had already made 
twenty hogsheads of wine from the grapes that 
grew in that region, and that they had all got into 
the habit of smoking tobacco. 

Hawkins tells us many other things about Flor- 
ida. Indeed, it is possible that, take it altogether, 
we have in his sketch the best account of any one 
of our Atlantic coast states, at so early a period of 
their history. He noticed that the tribal or com- 
munal houses were as big as English barns. These 
were made of tree trunks and poles covered with 



194 ^'^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

palmetto leaves. Inside, the fire kept burning all 
night. 

The country abounded in deer and game, fish 
and birds, millet, corn, grapes, besides very much 
sorrel. Hawkins describes the favorite dish of 
boiled corn meal, which the Yankees afterwards 
called " hasty pudding " ; the Englishmen in Penn- 
sylvania, who had come from the middle counties 
of England, "mush"; while the Dutch adopted the 
Indian word " suppawn." Hawkins may have called 
it "pap." He says, " It maketh good meal, beaten 
and sodden with water and eateth like that where- 
with we feed children." He noticed that the 
Frenchmen made soup of it. 

When John Hawkins arrived home in England 
with gold, silver, pearls, and jewels, there was great 
excitement throughout the kingdom. The Queen 
honored and rewarded the successful slaver, tak- 
ing dinner with him on board of his ship, and grant- 
ing him a coat of arms, whereon was a black shield 
with a golden lion walking over the waves. His 
crest was the figure of half a Moor; that is, a bound 
and captive slave with bands of gold on his arms 
and gold rings in his ears. Later on, this pious 
slave-robber added, by ofiicial permission, the pil- 
grim's scallop shell in gold, between the cross-staff 
of a palmer or pilgrim to the Holy Land. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

DRAKE PLOUGHS AN ENGLISH FURROW ROUND THE 

WORLD. 

THE Englishman's crusade of the sixteenth cen- 
tury was for slaves and money. Henceforth 
to him America was " the land of the Almighty Dol- 
lar," — the latter term being even then in vogue for 
a silver coin. Englishmen now became warmly 
interested in the promising new world. They even 
began to think a little of colonization, but much 
more of the money to be gotten by trading negroes 
and robbing the Spaniards. 

Guinea gold flowed into the English mint, 
though it was not till 1664 that the coin of that 
name was struck. The coinage of the guinea lasted 
till 181 7. Since then a guinea is a sentimental 
sum, but not a coin. A gift, an honorarium for a 
speech, sermon, or lecture, or a polite present, is 
made in o^uineas. Washes and baro^ains are made 
in the pounds, shillings, and pence of the mediaeval 
Teutonic era still retained by British people. 

In Spain, Philip H. got fearfully excited over the 
idea of the English burglars, as he considered them, 

195 



196 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY, 

breaking into his private treasure house. We soon 
find him issuing edicts that no EngHshman of any 
creed or kind should be allowed in the West In- 
dies. When edicts, as he found, were of no use, he 
set up the Inquisition in Mexico to torture and 
burn these foreigners from northern Europe, who 
singed his beard, picked his pockets, and captured 
his ships. While they did these things, he could 
not pay his troops who were fighting to destroy the 
Dutch United States. Hence, his mercenaries 
mutinied, and the Netherlanders got the advantage 
over him. 

With such tokens of favor from his queen, such 
rich profits in prospect, and withal, considering it 
highly pious and proper to steal men, and sell them 
for money, we find Hawkins starting out again in 
1567. This time Francis Drake commanded the 
Judith, while Hawkins himself was in his old ship, 
the Jes7is. The little hawk was the pioneer of the 
dragon. Where Hawkins swooped on chickens 
and picked bones, Drake was to swallow whole 
towns and fleets. 

Capturing five hundred negroes, though having 
to feed them during seven weeks, they finally arrived 
in the West Indies, where the people had been 
warned against them. Nevertheless, as the Spanish 
farmers and miners wanted slave labor, there was a 
chance to sell, though the Englishmen sometimes 



DRAKE PLOUGHS A FURROW ROUND THE WORLD. 1 97 

had to fight before getting permission to trade. 
Storm-beaten, they put into the harbor of Vera 
Cruz, near which is the famous castle San Juan 
d'Uloa, which was bombarded by our army and 
navy in 1846. A great Spanish fleet of twelve ships 
arriving, the English were attacked, and only the 
two little ships the Minion and the Jndith reached 
England in January, 1669. The poor Englishmen 
captured were horribly tortured by the Inquisition. 
Where Hawkins had been as Saul, Drake was 
now as David against the Spanish Philistines. He 
took terrible revenge for the " perfidy " of the Span- 
iards. Henceforth he devoted his life to doing as 
much injury to the King of Spain as possible. He 
did not pretend to be either an explorer or a trader ; 
but only a private avenger against the Spaniards. 
Queen Elizabeth was only too glad to let him go 
forth on his own risk and account. This would 
save her the trouble of declarins^ war while hurtino^ 
her enemies. She could approve or disown Drake 
as suited her policy. Drake made voyages to the 
West Indies in the years 1570, 1571, and 1572. 
Marching across the Isthmus, with the aid of the 
Maroons, a tribe of Indians reinforced with run- 
away black slaves, he climbed a tree, in the midst 
of the densely forested mountains. Seeing the 
great blue Pacific Ocean melting in the distance of 
silvery haze, he descended, fell on his knees, and 



198 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

prayed to God that some time he might sail on that 
sea and " make a perfect discovery of the same." 

After further service in EngHsh waters on the 
Queen's behalf, Drake was ready in 1577 for an- 
other piratical raid on the Spaniards, which proved 
to be in the end " the first English furrow ploughed 
round the world." Of his ships, the Pelican, the 
Elizabeth, Sivan, Marigold, and Christopher, the 
largest was of one hundred, and the smallest of 
fifteen tons. The Pelican had twenty cannon 
mounted on carriages, besides others in the hold. 
It was common in those days for guns, which could 
only fire stones and small balls, to burst, or be other- 
wise disabled. An extra lot was therefore taken in 
and stowed away in the hold to be used when wanted. 

Some idea of Drake's love of luxury and the 
wealth he had gotten, may be learned when we 
read that besides having^ musicians and rich furni- 
ture, all the vessels on the table and even many in 
the cook room were of pure silver. In order to 
mislead the Spanish envoy at London, Drake pre- 
tended to be going to Egypt, but when once out of 
the English Channel his prows were turned to the 
southwest, to the lands of El Dorado, — of silver, 
gold, and gems, — South America. 

Early in June they reached Port Saint Julian on 
the south coast of Patagonia, where they spent two 
months. One of the first sights they saw on arriv- 



DRAKE PLOUGHS A FUR ROW ROUND THE WORLD. 1 99 

ing were the well-picked and whitened bones of a 
human skeleton, at the base of a gibbet, on which 
Magellan had hanged one of his mutineers. Drake, 
no better or worse, at this same place, put to death 
one of the men of his command whom he believed 
to be treacherous. After the southern winter was 
over, they sailed southward, meeting with driving 
storms. They passed through the Straits of Magel- 
lan and got out into the Pacific, but alone. Drake's 
ship was indeed like a pelican in the wilderness, 
for none other of his squadron was in sight. The 
other ships had foundered or been shipwrecked, or 
the commanders had deserted this man whom the 
Spaniards always called " the dragon." Drake 
landed on a point of land and gave the name of 
Elizabeth Island to Terra del Fuego, or the Land 
of Fire. His tree-top glimpse had now become a 
boundless vision. 

Out into the Pacific he sailed northward, occa- 
sionally stopping for supplies. At Valparaiso he 
robbed a Spanish ship, and then kept upward along 
the coast, getting fresh water or provisions as he 
needed them. At Arica he made a tremendous 
haul, plundering the Spanish ships of their gold, 
silver, jewels, and spices, not caring for anything 
but what he could easily carry, for he had now but 
one ship. Arica is a town of Chili, whence now 
starts a railroad into the interior. 



200 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Callao was another rich place full of plunder, 
where Drake also got news from Europe. With a 
cart-load or more of silver in her gizzard, the Peli- 
ca7i now spread her white wings in pursuit of a 
treasure ship that had sailed two weeks before. 
Coming up with and capturing her on the first of 
March, Drake found her cargo to consist of about 
three million dollars' worth of bullion, coined and 
uncoined money, metallic vessels and gems ; or, 
what would be equal in our time, to about twelve 
millions of dollars. There were thirteen boxes of 
the silver coin called real, which until lately was 
called in our country " levy " or " bit," the half being 
" fip." These words are the English contractions 
of eleven-penny and five-penny bits or pieces. Reals 
were also called " Spanish shillings," and the " piece 
of eight," or eight shillings, a dollar. This capture 
gave the Englishmen plenty of small change for 
further use. 

There were also eighty pounds' weight of gold, 
twenty-six tons of uncoined silver, and an enor- 
mous golden cross with emeralds as large as pigeon 
eggs. Drake was kind enough not to put the Span- 
iards to death, though in those days of brutal war 
the captors on either side usually threw the cap- 
tured overboard. After six days he gave the cap- 
tain a change of linen and some provisions and let 
him and the crew go. He could afford to throw 



DRAKE PLOUGHS A FURROW ROUND THE WORLD. 20 1 

the shell away, after having opened the oyster and 
eaten the meat. 

All this time wondering what had become of his 
other ships, Drake kept northward, in the path of 
the Spanish explorers who had been before him. 
Everything was new, wild, and wonderful to his 
men. Some things were pleasant and some things 
otherwise. On one island an earthquake gave them 
a new and terrifying sensation. 

In 1 510, thirty years before Drake was born, a 
Spaniard had written a novel telling about a fabu- 
lous island rich in gold and precious stones, — 
somewhat akin to Antilia, or the Japanese Horai. 
From this romance the name California received its 
name. Thirty-six years before Drake, Cabrillo had 
discovered the coast line of this, one of the most 
important states of the American Union, but when 
Drake saw California, it was inhabited only by sav- 
ages of the stone age. Strangely enough, we know 
more about the exact discovery and exploration of 
our western or Pacific coast (with the names and 
dates, while the determinations of latitude and lon- 
gitude are more full and exact) than of our eastern 
coast, which is nearest to Europe. 

Drake no doubt at this time had the map of 
Furnala, made in 1574, which pictures Japan as if 
it were only a few miles off from the coast of North 
America. His men found it very cold even in 



202 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

June and July, the ground without greenness, and 
the natives wearing furs. The Pacific coast cHmate 
has not changed very much in three centuries. 
One Indian came out in a canoe and threw some 
tobacco on board the ship. No doubt the man in 
the canoe made an offering of tobacco, as an act of 
worship, supposing that the men in the Pelican 
were gods, for he would take nothing in exchange 
except a hat which was thrown him. Drake tried 
to find the western end of a passage homeward 
into the Atlantic Ocean, but was disappointed. He 
went no farther north than Oregon, which he named 
New Albion, after his native country, because the 
white cliffs which he saw reminded him of the 
southern sea-face of his own land. 

Giving up all idea of sailing eastward through 
the continent of America, and in that way getting 
back to England, Drake determined to return by 
the way of the Philippines and the Cape of Good 
Hope. He at once entrenched his camp and, set- 
ting up tents, began the work of refitting his ship. 
An immense crowd of Indians came on the ground, 
bringing feathers and tobacco as presents, the chief 
making a long speech which tired the English- 
men to listen to, they not being able to under- 
stand a word. In return, Drake lifted up his eyes 
to heaven and calling on his men to pray with him, 
they all knelt down together. After prayer, they 



DRAKE PLOUGHS A FURROW ROUND THE WORLD. 203 

sang songs, read chapters of the Bible, and returned 
presents to the Indians. 

Other ceremonies followed a few days later, when 
the great war chief and his body-guard visited the 
English settlement. In their ceremonies, Drake 
understood them to mean that they wanted to be- 
come the subjects of the white man. They put one 
of the feather crowns upon Drake's head and hung 
one of their great chains made of bone upon his 
neck. So in the name and to the use of Queen 
Elizabeth, Drake took the sceptre, crown, and dig- 
nity of the country into his hands. 

While his ship was being braced and cleansed, 
Drake travelled inland and saw enormous herds of 
deer, and what he thought were conies or rabbits, 
but were probably opossums. He erected a post 
on which he affixed a plate of brass, engraved with 
the Queen's name, with the date of landing, and 
the gift of the country by the people. He also gave 
specimens of the English sixpences to the people. 
Having driven fresh oakum between his planks, 
mended his cordage, strengthened his masts, and 
filled the water casks, Drake turned his prow west- 
ward. The friendly savages built fires on the hills 
and kept them up as long as the Pelican was in 
sight. 

Drake sailed successfully round the Cape of 
Good Hope. On September 26, 1580, in grand 



204 ^^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

style, with gilded masts, and his sailors dressed in 
silk, gold, and gems, he sailed into Plymouth. He 
was the British Puck. He had put a girdle round the 
earth. He then went to Court and told his adventures. 

So far from the Oueen or the Qrovernment either 
disowning Drake's acts as those of a pirate, or of 
making any claim to land which Drake had discov- 
ered, no one ever thought of this as a voyage of 
exploration at the time or until hundreds of years 
afterwards. As usual, the Spanish envoy in Lon- 
don made protest against Drake's piracy, but Eliza- 
beth was only too proud of the man, who, besides 
circumnavigating the globe, could bring home such 
a shipload of jewels, coin, and bullion. She made 
Drake a knight, and ordered the ship Pelican to 
be carefully kept. To-day in the Bodleian Library 
at Oxford there is a chair made of her timber by 
Sir John Davis, the Arctic navigator. 

Very appropriately, three hundred years after- 
wards. Christian men in America erected a cross 
on the Oregon coast to commemorate this visit of 
Albion's great navigator and the first Englishman 
who went round the globe. 

Both Drake and Hawkins afterwards tried their 
hand against the Spaniards of the West Indies, but 
Hawkins died of a wound, and Drake of a fever, and 
the expedition ended in loss and misery. There are 
some Englishmen who still hope that the leaden 



DRAKE PLOUGHS A FURROW ROUND THE WORLD. 205 

coffin in which Drake's body was sunk may be re- 
covered and his bones yet find a resting-place in his 
homeland. In " Westward Ho," the novel, Charles 
Kingsley tells grandly the story of these west- 
country freebooters. 

Drake and Hawkins were amonof the first EnQ^lish 
heroes of the sea. They set the example very often 
since followed by pious pirates and industrious buc- 
caneers. In diplomacy, war, statecraft, and religion, 
England has never lacked men of action, unscrupu- 
lous men whose sincere purpose — as sincere as that 
of a Spanish heretic-burner — has been to make 
England great. They set an example which Ameri- 
cans have too often followed. One of our naval 
officers made it his motto, " Right or wrong, my 
country," thus setting patriotism above righteous- 
ness, — a principle that makes of earth a hell. 

From the time of Hawkins and Drake, and long 
after, English sailors dressed in gay colors, wore 
gold earrings in their ears, and were very fond of 
flags and decorations. The brutalities of war and 
ship life were very great then, and the barbarities in 
the name of reliQ:ion showed how little the teachings 
and life of Jesus were understood. It took centu- 
ries for our fathers to learn that gain is not godliness, 
that slave-catching is inhuman, and that to persecute 
a man who differs from you in religion is not Christ- 
like, but devilish. 



206 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Yet there were even in the sixteenth century, some 
moderate men in power, Hke the repubhcan president 
of the Dutch United States, WilHam the Silent, who 
preached and practised the toleration which is com- 
mon to-day. In the countries where the Reformed 
churches were national or political, Bible-reading 
people nicknamed " Anabaptists " were already 
teachino: the doctrines which are now settled in the 
Constitution of the United States and commonplace 
in our country. Both Protestants and Catholics, in 
every country except Holland, from Russia to Eng- 
land, persecuted and killed these non-political Chris- 
tians. Some of these separatists, also, abused their 
liberty and became anarchists, but the Anabaptists, 
so-called, and the Mennonites are the real spiritual 
ancestors of most American Christians in many 
denominations. 



CHAPTER XX. 

Raleigh's dream of a new English nation. 

THE English, during the time of the Tudors, be- 
came a new nation. The old Wars of the 
Roses, the long quarrels between the nobility, were 
over. A closer union between the throne and the 
people resulted. England began to do something 
else than to raise sheep and wool. King Henry had 
encouraged his subjects to trade in the Netherlands 
and had enlarged the British navy. Queen Eliza- 
beth was just the kind of a woman to carry out her 
father's plans and even go beyond them. Henry 
was intensely English and, therefore, with all his 
faults he was very popular. His daughter was, like 
him, a strong character. Though fickle and vain, 
coquettish and fond of flattery, with a temper not 
always kept under control, she yet loved her country 
and people. She took good care of the finances 
and had great ability in governing. She encouraged 
her sailors and increased the loyalty of the people 
to the throne. 

The days of chivalry were not yet over, but the 
English knights instead of going on crusades, now 

207 



208 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

went to fight the Spaniards, by helping the Dutch 
repubhcans in their war of independence, by looting 
the Spanish plate fleets from the West Indies, or by 
attempting commerce or explorations. 

One of the best dressed and handsomest of these 
knights was Walter Raleigh, a Devonshire man born 
in 1552. When a student at Oxford, he left his 
books to go as volunteer on behalf of Huguenot lib- 
erty under Admiral Coligny. Afterwards he served 
in the Dutch army under William of Orange. His 
fight with Spain lasted during his whole life. His 
supreme idea was to make England great. He as- 
pired to clip the wings of Spain, which, like a great 
eagle, 'rampant and eager to make Holland and Eng- 
land its prey, seemed to overshadow Europe. He 
saw that the enemy had got rich by his possessions 
in America, and he proposed to make England 
mighty and opulent in the same way. When the 
colony sent out to Florida by Coligny had been de- 
stroyed by the Spaniard Menendez, Raleigh, who was 
a sailor as well as a soldier, wanted at once to settle 
and develop North America. His first cruise west- 
ward was in 1578 in command of the ship Falco7i 
under Sir Humphrey Gilbert. 

In those days it was very hard to provision a ship 
for a long voyage. Little was then known about 
preserving food in such quantity and variety so as 
to keep off that horrible disease called the scurvy. 



RALEIGH'S DREAM OF A NEW ENGLISH NATION. 209 

Many a voyage which began with promise ended in 
disaster because of the scurvy or of hunger. How- 
ever brave in spirit, men cannot sail or work on empty 
stomachs. Even hearts of oak require plenty of 
stimulus. In our day the average ship is healthier 
than the average house, but it was not so then. All 
of Gilbert's ships had to turn back. Raleigh him- 
self tried to reach the West Indies, but when near 
the Cape de Verde Islands his bread-bags were 
nearly empty, and he had to turn back. Fighting 
both the storms and the Spaniards on the way, he 
reached Plymouth, in May, 1579. 

Exploration is very costly business. Some one 
must pay the bills. Raleigh made up his mind to 
get rich first and then to be his own banker. He 
entered the Queen's service in Ireland and was 
very successful. He was not only brave, but witty 
and learned. He dressed magnificently and knew 
just how to please the coquettish Queen Elizabeth. 
He succeeded in makins^ a fortune. The Queen 
also gave him certain monopolies and the confis- 
cated estates of noblemen in both Ensfland and 
Ireland, and he found himself able to send out a 
colony at his own expense. The Queen would not 
let her favorite run the risk of Q:ettinQ^ killed and 
thrown overboard by Spaniards ; but Raleigh, though 
he did not himself go, sent out two ships which 
sailed April 27, 1584, to discover and explore the 



2IO THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

coast of North America northward from Florida. 
He did not know then that the Spaniards had 
ah'eady sailed along the coast as far as the Chesa- 
peake Bay. 

The road to the West Indies in those days lay in 
creeping along the coast of Europe and Africa to 
the Canary Islands and then striking out boldly 
westward. Instead of following a short straight line 
— the modern ocean lane, two miles wide — they 
moved first down, and then up, over half a circle. 
One month's sailing brought Raleigh's ships to the 
Antilles, June 20th. Then moving northward, on 
the 4th of July they reached the American coast, 
from which the land breeze wafted the delicious 
perfume of blooming flowers. 

Yet the ships could not get into the country, 
because they were not able to find an inlet. This 
seems strange to us who can see along the coast, on 
our well-made maps, all sorts of estuaries, bays, and 
arms of the sea. They sailed one hundred and 
twenty miles and then entered the first opening 
visible, which was probably New Inlet, in North 
Carolina. In the name of England's Queen, they 
took possession of the inviting land, which was very 
sandy and low toward the water's edge. Grapes 
were so plentiful that the very beating and surge of 
the sea overflowed them. Coming out of England, 
then a very bleak land compared with its garden- 



RALEIGH'S DREAM OF A NEW ENGLISH NATION. 211 

like surface as seen to-day, these men were pleased 
with the richness of this southern landscape and 
archipelago. The forests were full of deer, rabbits, 
hares, and birds in incredible abundance. Of trees 
they noticed the pine, cedar, cypress, sassafras, and 
others. 

The war chief of the country, with forty or fifty 
men who seemed to have very good manners, came 
to meet them. The English asked the name of the 
country. The savage, who did not understand the 
question, said, " Win-gan-da-coa," which means, " you 
wear fine clothes." The Englishman, supposing 
that the Indian had replied to his question, thought 
that "Win-gan-da-coa " was the name of the country. 
Many geographical names in all parts of the world 
have arisen in this same way, when exchange of 
ideas is by signs only. 

The next day the chief brought his wife and 
children to make a call on the white visitors. This 
American lady had a band of white coral on her 
forehead and strings of pearls hanging down from 
her ears to her waist. The other women wore ear- 
rings of copper, and the king had a plate of metal 
on his head. The men wore their hair lono: on one 
side, but the women on both sides. Captain Bar- 
low, with seven men, went twenty miles to Roanoke 
Island, where they found a village of nine houses 
built of cedar and fortified round about with sharp- 



212 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

pointed trees, with the entrance narrow and easily 
defended. Here they were entertained by the 
chiefs wife. 

Pleased and happy though they were with the air 
and the soil, the trees, the fruits, and the people, 
Raleigh's pioneers were not very practically minded 
about either exploration or colonization. After a 
few weeks they returned to England, taking with 
them two natives, one of them named Wanchese 
and the other Manteo, after whom the town in Dare 
County is named. 

Raleigh was delighted with the results of the 
voyage, and the Queen even more so. She made 
her favorite a knight, so that ever afterwards he was 
called Sir Walter Raleigh. She felt that her reign 
was honored by the discovery. She gave the new 
country a name which showed that she was still un- 
married. The state of Virginia is the oldest child, 
the first born of the noble family of English-speak- 
ing commonwealths. Raleigh had a new seal of his 
arms cut, showing that he was the warden and gov- 
ernor of the land of the Virmn Oueen. He became 
a member of Parliament from Devon, and secured 
political advantages which still further enriched him. 
He now dreamed of ruling a great estate beyond 
sea in semi-feudal style. 

Raleigh sent a squadron of seven ships, which 
sailed in the spring of 1585. On board were one 



RALEIGH'S DREAM OF A NEW ENGLISH NATION. 213 

hundred English and Irish householders, with many 
things necessary to begin a new state, but without 
one woman. Such a " colony " might make a camp, 
but never a home. It was under the charge of 
Ralph Lane, who had, like Raleigh, seen service in 
Ireland, and whom many Irishmen followed to the 
new world. Thomas Cavendish, who afterwards 
sailed round the world, Hariot the mathematician 
who developed the science of algebra, and the artist 
White, a good painter, who engaged to make water 
colors of what he saw, were of the number. 

The seven ships went out ready either to fight or 
to trade with Spaniards, on their long round-about 
way from the Canaries to the West Indies. In due 
season the squadron dropped anchors off the little 
sand-spit between Pamlico Sound and Ocacroke 
Inlet. 

What happened to Raleigh's colonies in North 
Carolina belongs not to this our story of the " Ro- 
mance of Discovery," but to our succeeding volume 
of " The Romance of Colonization." Suffice it to 
say, that in March, 1586, Sir Ralph Lane explored 
the Roanoke River in search of gold mines and an 
entrance into the Pacific Ocean. He and his men 
were driven back by hunger after having eaten their 
dogs. The colony was a total failure. Visited by 
Sir Francis Drake, who had been in the West Indies 
attacking the Spanish settlements, the colonists 



214 ^-^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

returned on his ships, reaching Plymouth, July 27, 
1586. 

Robbing Spaniards had thus far paid better than 
planting colonies. Though Raleigh's venture had 
not been a success, yet there was much to please the 
Queen, the Court, and himself. Thomas Hariot the 
mathematician, and the man who had best used his 
eyes and pen, brought back a good description of 
the country, and this, John White, the skilful artist, 
had illustrated in water colors ; for, at that time, 
there was scarcely an oil-painter in all England un- 
less it were a Dutchman or Italian. 

Among other things, the potato was carried into 
Ireland by the Irishmen. The tubers were first 
planted on Raleigh's estate, and in time formed the 
national vegetable of Ireland. They served also to 
enrich the British table, for at this time garden vege- 
tables were little known or used in England by the 
common folks, who in winter lived wholly on salt 
meat, fish, and grain. Royalty and the nobles had 
to depend on the Dutch. The island of Walcheren 
in Zealand was called " Queen Elizabeth's kitchen 
garden." Then there were Indian corn and tobacco. 
The dried weed made a great sensation and be- 
came very popular, even the game or joke of 
weio^hino: smoke ofettins: into voo:ue. The Dutch- 
men took to pipes and cigars even more than the 
English. 



RALEIGH'S DREAM OF A NEW ENGLISH NATION. 21 5 

Another Virginian enterprise was planned. With 
eighty-nine men, seventeen women, and two children, 
a second settlement was begun July 22, 1587. A 
little babe, the first child born of English parents 
in America, saw the light on the i8th of August, 
and was named Virginia. Her mother was the 
daughter of the governor, John White. Dare 
County was named after her father. Late in the 
autumn, Governor White returned to England for 
provisions and reinforcements ; but owing to the 
war excitement in England on account of the 
Spanish Armada, no help ever reached the colonists, 
most of whom miserably perished. 

The first English colony in America w^as a failure, 
because of inexperience and a badly chosen place of 
settlement ; but, more than all, on account of the 
war with Spain. It added a little, but only a little, 
to geographical knowledge ; yet, nevertheless, it was 
Raleigh, who by talking and writing, by his money, 
his energy, and his practical experiments, educated 
Englishmen into the idea of building up a nation 
beyond the sea. 

When the seventeenth century opened, not only 
had England failed to hold a foot of land in the 
new world, but it seemed as though Spain alone 
would dominate the entire continent. Who then 
could foresee that great family of English-speaking 
nations in both hemispheres and on five continents, 



2l6 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

which are now bound together by a common lan- 
guage, hope, and idea? If England is to be honored 
above all countries on earth as the mother of com- 
monwealths, Raleigh is the first and greatest of 
foster-fathers. 



I 



CHAPTER XXI. 

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH EXPLORES VIRGINIA AND THE 
NEW ENGLAND COAST. 



T 



HE settlement of Jamestown belongs to the 
romance of colonization, and not to that of dis- 
covery and exploration. Nevertheless, Captain 
John Smith was an English explorer and adven- 
turer, rather than a colonizer. He was such a great 
romancer and even so much of a falsifier, that it is 
very uncertain whether he ever was in Hungary 
fighting the Turks, as he declared he had been. It 
is, however, an historical fact, that he gained his 
experience in war, as did every one of the military 
fathers and protectors of the American colonies, in 
the Dutch war of independence. Captain John 
Smith served four years in the army of the Dutch 
United States against Spain. 

Arriving at Jamestown, when about thirty years 
old, he was taken prisoner while exploring the 
Chickahominy. He was brought by Opecanca- 
nough, whose name remains on a Virginia river, — 
the Opecan, — to Powhattan, a war chief whose town 
was on the York River. After a few weeks Smith 



217 



2l8 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

was released with presents of corn for the colonists. 
He made a boating voyage, as much for food as for 
knowledge, up the James River as far as Richmond, 
all the while, no doubt, having the hope of striking 
upon some passage into China. 

In 1608 he made two extended surveys of the 
Chesapeake Bay and its tributary waters. He 
probably entered the Susquehanna, the Potomac, 
and the Potapsco rivers, and looked upon the site 
of Baltimore. He heard of the dreaded Mohawks, 
— a tribe of the Iroquois whose power extended 
from Canada to the Carolinas, and from the Con- 
necticut to the Mississippi, and with whom Cham- 
plain in Canada and La Salle in Illinois, as we have 
seen, had already come in contact. Captain Smith 
made a map of his discoveries, which is still very 
interesting. He saw from the first that the only 
thing to make colonies successful was intelligently 
directed labor, good agriculture, and manual indus- 
try. Gold-seeking meant the chase of phantoms, 
followed by starvation and death. He left the col- 
ony in September, 1610, but whether for his own or 
the colony's good, or both, it is not certain. 

In 1614, having noticed that "the Dutch had 
become rich by the contemptible trade of fish," and 
had thus beaten even the Spaniards in acquiring 
wealth, so that the powerful monarchy had to make 
truce with the little republic. Smith got London 



CAPTAIN JOHN SMI TH EX PL ORES VI R GINIA. 2 1 9 

merchants to fit out for him two ships with which 
to open the mines of wealth in the ocean. Coming 
over to the coast of North America, he kept his 
men busy in fur-trading and fishing, whereby he 
and they made plenty of money, and at the same 
time he explored a considerable part of the coast of 
our three eastern states, Maine, New Hampshire, 
and Massachusetts. He made a pretty fair map of 
the country named New England, and sent copies 
to his friend Henry Hudson. For his services, he 
was given the rank of admiral. 

In June, 1615, he tried to establish a small colony 
in Maine, but storms prevented this. He was capt- 
ured by a French man-of-war, but escaped in a 
boat. From 16 16 to 1631 he wrote books and 
pamphlets, showing his countrymen their grand 
opportunity, and urging the colonization of Amer- 
ica. He also narrated his own adventures on the 
European continent, many of which, as he relates 
them, are now believed to be fictitious. With all 
his faults, Captain John Smith must be ranked 
among the first of the English explorers of America. 

When the Pilgrim fathers and mothers, who had 
been reinforced and tempered in republican Hol- 
land, landed on Plymouth Rock to lay the founda- 
tions of distinctive America, the original work done 
by English explorers on the Atlantic coast had been 
neither large, nor important, nor brilliant. Except 



220 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the voyage of the ItaHan, Sebastian Cabot, along 
the shore, and the entrance of some parties into a 
few of the rivers, bays, and inlets, they had not dis- 
covered or explored any part of the coast not pre- 
viously made known by either the Spanish or the 
French, while the Dutch discovered and revealed 
the coast line between Virginia and New England. 
It was, however, reserved for the Englishman, last 
in discovery, to be first in successful colonization. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

THE DUTCH ATTEMPT THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE AND 
OPEN THE SEAS OF THE ORIENT. 

TO the day of his death, Columbus thought he 
had discovered only some islands off the coast 
of Japan. The aim of Cabot, Frobisher, Davis, and 
others, even into the seventeenth century, was to 
discover a passage to China either by the north- 
west or the southwest, or right through America. 
With pluck and perseverance, they kept on trying 
to find also the Northeast Passage. The southeast 
route around the Cape of Good Hope was already 
held by Portuguese, and, besides, it was exceedingly 
far off. The company of Merchant Adventurers, of 
which Sebastian Cabot in his old age became presi- 
dent, sent Sir Hugh Willoughby with three ships 
northward, but he never came back. Richard Chan- 
cellor, in another vessel, "discovered " Archangel and 
began direct trade with Russia. The Muscovy Com- 
pany was formed in London. In 1556 the brave 
Stephen Burrough took his little English ships up 
as far as Nova Zembla, and partially explored it and 
the coasts adjacent, but came back with experience 

221 



222 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

only. Once again, in 1580, the Englishmen tried 
again, only to be driven back by the frost king. 
After that, it was impossible to get English capital- 
ists to advance money on any further experiment in 
finding the Northwest Passage to China. Failing 
again and again to cut through the continent, and 
losing money in the many attempts, they never got 
thoroughly interested in America until its commer- 
cial advantages had been demonstrated. 

During the first age of exploration, the Dutch 
United States had not been able to join in advent- 
ures on the deep and distant seas. The little re- 
public of seven states, which in 1579 formed their 
Union, and in 1581 published their Declaration of 
Independence, had but eight hundred thousand in- 
habitants, and was fighting for life against Spain. 
Their territory consisted chiefly of a narrow strip 
of fertile clay soil lying along the sea, between the 
Scheldt and the Ems rivers, with a large sand- 
heath and plenty of morasses over the rest of the 
national area, all of which was no larger than New 
Hampshire. 

Every man, every ship, and every dollar had to 
be used to fight the Spaniards. At first the case 
seemed as hopeless as that of the shepherd boy of 
Bethlehem, armed only with five smooth stones and 
a sling, against the Philistine giant. Nevertheless, 
the Dutch, with genuine grit, with faith in God, with 



DUTCH ATTEMPT THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE. 223 

intense hatred against the Inquisition, with enter- 
prise and skill in trade, kept up the fight. They 
paid their debts, especially the soldiers' wages, so 
that their army never mutinied and the country 
actually grew richer. Declaring war openly in an 
honorable way, they enriched themselves by seizing 
the Spanish treasure ships and by keeping up trade 
with their enemies' countries and colonies even in 
time of war. One admiral, Piet Hein, captured the 
Silver Fleet, containing twelve millions of dollars. 

When the English abandoned the bold but dis- 
appointing work in the North Sea, the Dutch re- 
solved to find the northern route to China. The 
first proposition of the sort had come to them, in 
1 58 1, from the English sea-captain. Beets, but was 
then necessarily refused. Gradually, however, the 
idea of beating Spain at sea and compelling her to 
sue for peace, became popular and was made very 
effective. By the end of the century, having begun 
the war in 1567, they sent out Dutch ships and men 
to plant colonies in the world at large, which had 
been divided up by the Pope, between the Spaniards 
and Portuguese. 

The Dutch government had not begun hostilities 
against the Spaniards in any mean or underhanded 
way, by privateering, piracy, or buccaneering, but in 
open war honorably declared, and when they made 
truce with the Spaniards in 1609 ^^^^y kept it in 



224 ^^^' ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

good faith. Their rulers were not vacillating, now 
approving and now disapproving of their captains 
at sea as it suited their changing humors, but the 
States-General or Congress, in 1614, publicly offered 
a prize of twenty-five thousand guilders to any one 
who would discover a northern passage to the 
East Indies. To win the money, the navigator 
must go and return. Dutch traders made expedi- 
tions among the icebergs, and opened a good busi- 
ness with those regions bordering on the White Sea 
between Lapland and Russia, having their chief sta- 
tion at Archangel. The great commercial house of 
de Moucheron, at Middleburg in Zealand, was espe- 
cially famous for its wealth made in this way. As 
early as 1598, it is said, Dutch ships and crews 
were in the Hudson and Delaware rivers, but simply 
as traders making no claim as discoverers. 

Among the learned promoters of Dutch explora- 
tion was Domine Petrus Plancius, who besides being 
a pastor and preacher was one of the best-informed 
geographers in Europe. His writings and personal 
influence greatly helped to send the ships of the 
republic in all oceans. In 1594, 1595, and 1596, 
brave soldiers and skilful pilots carried the orange, 
white, and blue flag still farther northward and 
eastward. 

One of the most famous of these expeditions was 
that of Heemskerk, Barentz, and Derijp, who were 



DUTCH ATTEMPT THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE. 225 

sent out In 1596. They discovered Nova Zembla, 
which is a pair of twin islands Hke those of Tsushima 
between Japan and Korea, and also Spitsbergen. 
Their ship was so frozen in, that they w^ere obliged 
to winter on Nova Zembla. They had plenty of 
clothing, wine, and food, except meat. Using the 
driftwood, they constructed a hut with a big fire- 
place. The white polar bears prowled about them, 
evidently longing to taste the Dutchmen, who shot 
Bruin and used his fat to feed their lamps, which 
were kept burning during the perpetual night from 
November 4 to January 24. 

These merry Dutchmen, in the white world of 
ice and snow and far from their homes, celebrated 
with fun and frolic their old home-land festival on 
the 5th of January — the eve of the day of the 
Three Kings — by tossing the pancake and drink- 
ing healths to their boatswain, who acted for the 
nonce as sovereign of Nova Zembla. When day- 
light came, the bears left and the foxes came in 
troops, furnishing the men with fresh and whole- 
some meat, and with material for caps and socks. 
In June, fearing lest they might be again shut in 
by the ice, they left their ship among the bergs. 
In two open boats, and despite many perils and 
labors, they reached Norway and home, where they 
were welcomed as men risen from the dead. Their 
story has often been told and sung by 23rose writers 

Q 



226 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

and poets. They were proud of having gone 
further than the EngHshmen, but their awful ex- 
periences dampened for a long time any zeal for 
further explorations. Within the present century, 
the relics of Barentz and his men have been found 
and placed in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam, 
where to-day they are eloquent and compel tears. 

The story of these Arctic explorers was well 
known in Ensfland. We find it referred to on 
the theatre stage. Shakespeare in "Twelfth Night," 
Act III., Scene II., makes Fabian in Olivia's house 
say to Sir Andrew Ague-cheek, " You are now 
sailed into the North of my lady's opinion ; where 
you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's 
beard." 

Nevertheless, the Hollanders were not discour- 
aged. They turned their thoughts in other direc- 
tions and to warmer regions, being determined that 
the Spaniards and Portuguese should not monopo- 
lize trade with the far East. When Cornelius Hout- 
man of Gouda, — famous for its pipes and printing, 
— who had spent some years at Lisbon, came back 
and told of the tremendous profits made by the 
Portuguese in spices, the desire to have a hand in 
the trade was strong. By the advice of Domine 
Plancius, nine Dutch merchants formed a company 
and at once fitted out at their own cost four vessels 
which cleared from the Texel, April 2, 1595, for Ban- 



DUTCH ATTEMPT THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE. 22/ 

tarn and Java — names now associated with diminu- 
tive chickens and good coffee. After fighting storms, 
Portuguese, and tropical diseases, ninety brave men, 
out of the two hundred and fifty who started 
out, returned to Amsterdam in 1597, with enough 
pepper, nutmeg, and mace to lower at once the 
high prices of spices. There was a general jubilee 
all over Holland. The Dutch had invaded Portu- 
oal's half of the world. 

The o:reat obstacle to the navio-ation of Eastern 
seas was the want of charts and geographical knowl- 
edofc. Yet even this was soon overcome. There 
was a Dutchman named Jan van Linschoten born 
in Haarlem in 1563. He had two brothers in Spain 
established in business, which, in 1586, the King of 
Spain broke up, by seizing Dutch ships, and order- 
ing all trade with the heretics to be stopped. The 
young Haarlemer entered the service of the Bishop 
of Goa, when that Portuguese prelate went out to 
India. Linschoten, in making this voyage, learned 
the sea-route and methods of naviofation and trade. 
Having returned to his own country and while liv- 
ing at Enkhuizen, in 1592, he joined himself as a 
trader, or supercargo, to one of the ships which, 
in 1594, went through the Arctic seas to find the 
way to India. Turned back by icebergs, he took a 
great interest in the expedition of Heemskerk and 
Barentz in 1596. In the same year, he published 



228 THE ROMANCE OE DISCOVERY. 

his wonderful books which gave charts and told of 
the sea-routes not only to the Spice Islands, but 
even to the Chinese coasts, Formosa, and Japan. 

Linschoten's writings opened to all Europe, but 
especially to the Dutch and English, the whole 
Eastern world. He was treasurer of the city of 
Enkhuizen, not then, as it is now, a sleepy little 
town, but a great flourishing city with hundreds of 
ships daily at its wharves. His books treated of 
the voyage of a mariner to the East or Portuguese 
Indies, with descriptions of the cruises made by the 
Portuguese in the East. At last the " East Indies," 
so long talked about, were actually mapped and 
described, and the way thither made clear; but the 
Portuguese looked on the Dutchmen as burglars 
who had broken into their secret house and rifled 
their private papers. Another volume described 
the coast of Guinea and another the resources 
of the King of Spain. Linschoten's books were 
quickly translated into Latin, French, English, and 
German and had a tremendous effect. Soon after 
this, the Dutch East and West India companies 
were organized, and also the English companies, 
of the same name, which were copied after the 
Dutch. 

Linschoten's book gave the first true map of the 
world in which the East India shores, islands, and 
routes were accurately placed. It made a deep 



DUTCH ATTEMPT THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE. 229 

impression in England, where we find it made the 
subject of a joke in the theatres. Marian, in Shakes- 
peare's " Twelfth Night," Act III., Scene II., says of 
Malvolio, after the latter had been misled by a false 
letter into making love to Countess Olivia, " He 
does smile his face into more lines than are in the 
new map, with the augmentation of the Indies." 
Another Dutchman, Gerard Mercator, by his globes 
and maps, especially those drawn on what are called 
" Mercator's projection," did more than any other 
one person to set men's minds free from the ancient 
and imperfect notions of Ptolemy, whose geography 
had been rendered obsolete by the numerous dis- 
coveries of the sixteenth century. 

After this, the orange, white, and blue flag of the 
Dutch republic began to flutter in every sea, and 
expeditions for trade and exploration were numer- 
ous. They examined the coasts of countries, like 
India, which the Portuguese had possessed. The 
Dutch established tradinsf houses at a number of 
points in Guinea and along the coast of Africa, and 
in India, Malacca, Burma, Formosa, and Japan. 
They discovered and explored the coasts of the 
Malay Archipelago, New Holland now called Aus- 
tralia, New Zealand, and Tasmania or Van Die- 
men's Land. The Dutch were the first to begin 
studying the Oriental languages, and they founded 
the first Asiatic society. In time, they conquered 



230 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago from 
the Portuguese. 

Turning their attention to America, as early as 
1598, they sent out an expedition westward, which 
sailed through Magellan's Straits and into the 
Pacific. A Dutchman from the city of Hoorn dis- 
covered and named Cape Horn. In later years they 
captured from the Spaniards some of the West 
India Islands, set up factories in Guiana and Brazil, 
explored the archipelago south and west of Patago- 
nia, and repeatedly circumnavigated the world. No 
one would ever get any idea from a geography or 
atlas now published in England or the United 
States, how numerous were the discoveries and how 
great were the explorations which the Dutch made 
in every part of the world ; for the British conquer- 
ors have erased or Anglicized most of the Dutch 
names formerly on the maps. 

It was when in search of the Northwest Passage 
that Henry Hudson in the Dutch ship. Half Moon, 
— so named after a famous fortress of that name, — 
discovered and entered the Hudson River. 

Undiscouraged by the English and Dutch at- 
tempts to reach China by sailing around Russia 
and Siberia, Hudson resolved again to dare the 
terrors of the ice and snows. His whole mature 
life had been spent on icy seas. In 1607, being 
employed by the Muscovy Company, in a little ship 



DUTCH ATTEMPT THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE. 23 1 

with only ten men, he had reached within ten 
degrees of the pole. In 1608 he had sailed as far 
as Nova Zembla. When he came back, the Am- 
sterdam Dutchmen, eager to find some one of 
experience and ability who would try once again 
to win the golden prize of twenty-five thousand 
guilders, were ready to employ Hudson in the new 
venture. At first the merchants and the sea-captain 
could not agree on terms, and for a while it looked 
as if the French envoy in the Netherlands would 
get Hudson into French service; but on the 8th of 
January, 1609, Captain Hudson and his friend Hon- 
dius, the famous map-maker who could talk both 
Dutch and English, met and agreed. Hudson 
soon informed the French minister that he could 
not serve King Henry IV. 

The directors of the East India Company con- 
tracted with Hudson to fit out a vessel of sixty tons' 
burden for a voyage, around the north of Nova 
Zembla, to India. It was wiiile Hudson was wait- 
ing for the sailing of his ship, that the English 
refugees escaping from persecution, and destined 
to found Massachusetts, arrived in Amsterdam from 
Scrooby, England. Some of them may have seen 
him sail away, for it is very probable that they lived 
in the neighborhood of the wharves. Plancius and 
Linschoten, no doubt, helped Hudson with advice 
and maps. 



232 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

On the fourth day of April, the Half Moon swung 
clear from her moorings, within the half-moon canal 
at Amsterdam and in front of the Weeper's Tower, 
— which old building is still standing, and contains 
the harbor master's office. About and in front of 
this tower, on both sides of the canal, were gathered 
the women, children, and friends of the hardy Dutch 
mariners about to sail on adventurous voyages. 
Then, and afterwards, during the next fifty years, 
many crowds assembled here to see ships sailing 
for America. Hudson, passing out into the Zuyder 
Zee and up through the Texel, was soon in the 
North, butting against the great ice mass that re- 
fused to open or to allow him to reach Nova Zem- 
bla. It was quite soon evident that he could not 
find India that year by going eastward. What 
should he do } 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE ORANGE, WHITE, AND BLUE IN THE HUDSON RIVER. 

HUDSON'S crew consisted of but twenty men. 
Like himself, the sailors did not want to go 
home empty-handed. So he gave them a choice of 
two routes in seeking the Northwest Passage. The 
first was by sailing about the latitude of forty de- 
grees. This course would bring them to a warm and 
comfortable climate. Or, they might sail through 
Davis Strait and inside the Arctic circle. In either 
case he hoped to reach the Orient. 

Although the crew voted to try the Davis Strait 
passage, yet, either on account of storms which drove 
him out of his course, or else because he deliber- 
ately chose to try a more southern passage, Hudson 
moved southwestwardly. He soon reached New- 
foundland, sailed down along the coast of Maine, 
and stopped at Mount Desert Island, where he cut 
down and trimmed a huQ^e tree to make a new fore- 
mast. He came to Cape Cod, which he named New 
Holland. Getting far out beyond the sands and 
shallows, he did not see the coast again until the 
2Sth of August, when he found himself off the coast 

233 



234 ^^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

of Maryland. Moving northward alongshore, he en- 
tered Delaware Bay, and coasted along and around 
New Jersey. 

On Wednesday, September 2, 1609, at five o'clock 
in the afternoon, he passed around Sandy Hook. 
Charmed with the scenery, he cast his anchor in 
what he thought was a great lake of water. He 
was in New York Bay, where for ten days he re- 
mained, keeping his men meanwhile busy in making 
soundings, locating the channel, and exploring the 
bay beyond the narrows. He invited the Indians 
to come on board his ship and treated them well, 
but in the trip beyond the narrows, Coleman, one of 
his crew, was shot by the red men. He traded off 
axes, knives, shovels, and other tools or trifles for 
furs. The savages made ornaments of whatever 
could be scoured and kept bright. At last, believ- 
ing it was safe to do so, he took his ship up into 
this waterway, which he thought might possibly 
lead toward China, if not to it. Passing what is 
now the Battery, he sailed up along Manhattan 
Island, the Palisades, the Highlands, the Catskills, 
and reached the vicinity of Troy about the 20th 
of September. This was what we call the head of 
navigation, and the water was too shallow to allow 
further progress. Hudson sent a ship's boat about 
twenty-seven miles northward beyond the anchor- 
age. The men found the river still more shallow, 



ORANGE, WHITE, AND BLUE IN HUDSON RIVER. 235 

and the volume of water growing less, with a great 
mountainous country lying beyond. 

This was a sad disappointment to Hudson and 
his crew, after they had sailed nearly one hundred 
and fifty miles through so noble a stream. Much of 
the water was salt or brackish until past the High- 
lands, and hence they supposed that they were in 
a strait, rather than a river flowing out of springs 
in the mountains and therefore entirely landlocked. 
There was no getting to China that way. On the 
23d of September they turned their prow south- 
ward and after eleven days sailed out from Sandy 
Hook. 

Thus, for over a month, amid the autumnal glories 
of nature's colors, the orange, white, and blue flag of 
the federal republic of the Netherlands had been 
mirrored on the grandest river in eastern North 
America. The brave Hollanders and their English 
captain had revealed a new coast, river, and territory 
between New England and Virginia. 

Instead of going, as most vessels would have done, 
to the West Indies or the Canary Islands, the Half 
Moon moved straight across the ocean, arriving No- 
vember 7, 1609, ^t Dartmouth. At first, the Eng- 
lishmen wanted to claim the credit of this discovery. 
They detained both ship and captain, and the Half 
Moo7i did not get to Amsterdam till July of the new 
year. The British government permitted Hudson 



236 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

to keep his contract with his Dutch employers and 
send on his report to Amsterdam, yet Hudson him- 
self probably never got to Holland again. Never- 
theless, Henry Hudson had discovered for the Dutch 
the greatest of all the gateways, from the Atlantic 
into the heart of the region which is now United 
States territory. 

The next year, with English sailors, Hudson 
started again to sail through America to China. 
He entered and explored the great bay which is 
named after him. Then his crew mutinied, and 
putting him with his son and seven infirm sailors 
in an open boat, set them adrift amid the floating 
ice. So ended his useful and daring life. 

Strangely enough, Champlain, the French ex- 
plorer, as well as Hudson visited Mount Desert 
Island, in 1609, and thence moved northward and 
into the St. Lawrence, while Hudson went south- 
ward and into the waterway of the Empire State. 
Within four months of time and two degrees of 
latitude, they were near each other in the territory 
of New York, Champlain being at Ticonderoga and 
Hudson at Troy. It was like the nearness and far- 
ness of de Soto and Coronado in the Mississippi 
valley. 

The actions of Champlain and Hudson were 
initial, typical, and far-reaching in influence upon 
the decision of the question which occupied states- 



ORANGE, WHITE, AND BLUE IN HUDSON RIVER. 23/ 

men, armies, and nations from* 1609 until 1763. 
That question was, whether Latin or Germanic 
civilization should prevail in North America. The 
French were a military people, bound by Church 
and State to mediaeval and feudal ideas. The 
Dutch were commercial, republican, and full of 
modern and progressive ideas. The Hurons and 
Algonquins became allies of the French. The Iro- 
quois from the year 1609 sought the Dutch and 
remained their friends and helpers. In the long 
struggle that followed, first the Iroquois, then the 
Dutch, and finally the English prevailed. The tri- 
color flag, with all it meant of hope for freedom and 
republican government still remains, though Indian, 
Dutch, French, or British power in the Hudson 
valley is no more. 

Hudson had discovered new coasts, — those of 
our Middle States from the tip of Delaware to 
nearly the northern end of New York. He had 
found a great river and its tributaries, and had told 
of the men, animals, and wonderful products seen 
by him. Immediately the desire to get the furs 
in this new market became a passion ; for the 
Dutch lived in a cold damp country, and peltry 
was ever in great demand. Since the trade with 
Archangel in Russia had been shut off, the Dutch- 
men were very glad to find in the new world what 
seemed to be a market; where, instead of hard 



238 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

money, they need only pay in beads, trinkets, axes, 
and knives, while the supply of furs appeared to be 
inexhaustible. A trading company had already 
been formed, and no sooner did the Half Moon 
sail into the river Y at Amsterdam on her return, 
than the directors engaged the Dutch mate and 
a number of the crew to make another trip to 
America. With others, these men who had seen 
America started off again. Entering the Hudson 
River, they met the redskins coming off in their 
canoes with bundles of beaver skins and other 
furs. On their breasts dangled the various bits of 
hardware which Hudson had bartered on his first 
voyage. Even shovel blades had become jewellery. 

All Holland was soon stirred up on the subject 
of furs and exploration. Here was a market as good 
as China, but much nearer home. The merchants 
living in Rotterdam, Hoorn, and Enkhuizen, de- 
manded of their state legislatures and the Dutch 
Congress all information possible about the new 
country, and to have the charts of the South, or 
Delaware, River, and the North, or Hudson, River 
published. The facts in hand were duly forthcom- 
ing: and the res^ion was named New Netherland. 

Note this name. It was not New Netherlands. 
The Dutch were now a nation, with one country, 
and not merely a collection of provinces. New 
Netherland meant unity. It was the token of vie- 




ARRIVAL OF THE " HALF MOON" AT THE HUDSON RIVER. 



ORANGE, WHITE, AND BLUE IN HUDSON RIVER. 239 

tory over Spain, and another way of translating 
their national motto Eendracht inaakt Macht, or 
" Union makes strength." 

In the year 1612 five ships were despatched for 
further exploration and trade. Among the officers 
of these ships were Henry Christiansen, Adriaen 
Block, and Cornelius Jacobson May. Two of these 
names are preserved in Block Island and Cape 
May. On their return home, besides a cargo of 
peltry, they brought two sons of war chiefs, whom 
they named Valentine and Orson. These young 
Indians were taken around through the different 
Dutch provinces, and the sight of them excited a 
tremendous interest in the New Netherland beyond 
sea. 

The year 1609 was the first one of the Great 
Truce. Spain had been trying during forty-three 
years to conquer the United States of the Nether- 
lands, but had not succeeded. She had already 
buried tens of thousands of her sons and mercena- 
ries in the Dutch ditches, but the men who fousfht 
for freedom were very tough, brave, and skilful, and 
were growing richer and stronger every day. Spain, 
fearing exhaustion, had to ask for peace, which was 
finally granted, after the owner of Peru and Mexico 
had recognized the Dutch Congress or States- 
General as " their Hio-h Mio;htinesses." 

By the terms of this truce, however, the Dutch 



240 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

could not in honor begin a colony in New Nether- 
land ; for it would have been against their treaty 
to have then settled the country and occupied it. 
The Dutch kept good faith with Spain. Tolerant 
and ready to welcome men who worshipped God 
in whatever way pleasing to them, provided they 
obeyed the laws of the republic, the Dutch govern- 
ment gave asylum and welcome to Jews, Roman 
Catholics, the Anabaptists (so-called), the Walloons 
and French Huguenots, and to the Pilgrim Fathers, 
mothers and children, and to many other religious 
refugees driven out from England. Yet to send 
a colony to America, in dominions still claimed by 
Spain, would have been an act of war. 

Yet, all the time the Dutchmen kept talking 
about New Netherland, as well as their other con- 
quests and discoveries. It is true that Barneveldt, 
the Arminian political party, and the ultra-State- 
Sovereignty men opposed the idea of colonization, 
but the majority of people and the National party, 
or the Calvinists, led by Prince Maurice, heartily 
favored planting a Dutch colony in New Nether- 
land. Jesse de Forest of Leyden was one of thou- 
sands who looked forward to the time when, the 
truce being over, they could occupy the American 
Netherland with farmers as well as traders and 
build towns and cities. Barneveldt, the great states- 
man and diplomatist, feared that the Dutch people 



ORANGE, WHITE, AND BLUE IN HUDSON RIVER. 24 1 

might be led away by military ambition, while 
Maurice, the President or Stadtholder and head 
of the army, and the Dutch people in general, espe- 
cially their ministers, geographers, and navigators, 
eagerly hoped to see the region about the Delaware 
and Hudson rivers become a New Holland. Al- 
though the Dutch could not then colonize Manhat- 
tan Island, they built huts where the sailors might 
find shelter and get fresh water and provisions. 

Captain Christiansen sailed with Block in 1613, 
— the one in the Fortune (or Good Tidings), the 
other in the Tiger, — and, landing on Manhattan 
Island, made it the centre of the fur-trade with the 
Indians. He determined to remain with his men 
through the winter and some time later, and so 
these first white inhabitants on the site of New 
York City built houses there, using the tree-trunks 
for posts, making the walls of boards, and roofing 
and covering them with the bark of trees peeled off 
in great masses. 

The Dutch were something more than mere trad- 
ers. They were true explorers, having a real desire 
to add to the science of geography which was 
so richly cultivated in their native country. The 
names of their countrymen, Plancius, Linschoten, 
Mercator, and Wagenaar, were already honorably 
known throughout all the civilized world. We do 
not find the level-headed Dutchmen digging for 



242 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

gold or searching for a passage to China, but en- 
gaging industriously in honest trade. From his 
abode on Manhattan Island, Christiansen, in his 
boats, explored the numerous and wonderful water- 
ways which lead to the island whereon is America's 
greatest city. 

After making himself acquainted with that won- 
derful system of waterways which makes New York 
Bay the greatest of all the gateways from the Atlan- 
tic into the continent, Christiansen took his ship, 
Good Tidings (or Good Fortune, as we may translate 
the name), up to the great northern centre of Indian 
trade. This was at the junction of the Mohawk 
and the Hudson rivers, where the Indian trails from 
the north, west, east, and south came together. 
Here, also, the converging waterways and the valleys, 
with the wonderful configuration of the country, 
make one of the most interesting strategic points 
in the eastern United States. Nowhere else on the 
continent, from Labrador to Alabama, does the great 
Appalachian chain of mountains sink so low, form- 
ing a great natural gateway between New Eng- 
land and the West. From the St. Lawrence River 
to Sandy Hook, there is a great rift valley and a 
natural waterway, which crosses the land highways 
between the rising and setting sun. The railways 
of to-day from the north, south, east, and west 
(except that through the Hoosac Tunnel), do but 



ORANGE, WHITE, AND BLUE IN HUDSON RIVER. 243 

follow the Indian trails once made for the moccasin. 
The steamboats run in the old water-paths of the 
canoe. 

There was not at this time a more intellectual 
or keen-witted people in all Europe than the brave 
republicans of Holland. They were daring, enter- 
prising, and resourceful. Their universities so far 
surpassed those of Great Britain that thousands of 
English and Scottish students attended at Leyden, 
Utrecht, Harderwijk, and Groningen. Those who 
look at the Dutch through the spectacles of Eng- 
lish or sectional American prejudice make a great 
mistake. Such people cannot properly understand 
either Netherlandish or American history. 

When the winter was over, Christiansen chose 
Barren Island, in the middle of the Hudson River, 
as his headquarters. Here he built a fort, the first 
in New Netherland, which he named Nassau, after 
Maurice, Count of Nassau, the great defender of the 
Dutch Union and the patron of exploration and 
of colonies. The lordly river which Hudson had 
entered was now named Mauritius. Barren Island 
near Albany, like Barren Hill near Philadelphia and 
several other very fertile places in the United States, 
was named after the bears. Both island and hill are 
on rich soil and are well covered with trees. 

After making further explorations, Christiansen 
was killed by Orson, one of the two Indians who 



244 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

had been in Holland, though we do not know why. 
The command of the fort then fell upon Jacob 
Eelkins, who for three or four years remained at 
the head of the station. He found the Iroquois 
exceedingly anxious to buy firearms, and learned 
that they came from long distances westward to 
get them. At that time, no better guns were made 
anywhere else in Europe than in Holland. The 
musketeers of Holland and other cities constantly 
practised at the butts, or doclcn, and the Dutch were 
superb marksmen. The evolution of the firearm 
from the heavy arquebus to the modern musket was 
proceeding rapidly. Most old English words refer- 
ring to a gun, especially to the firing part, and the 
lock and cock, are of Dutch origin. 

The later explorations of the Mohawk valley, by 
Arendt van Curler, revealed the wonderful canoe 
route and waterway between the East and the West, 
connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson. The 
water passage and land routes northward to New 
France had been of old used by the Iroquois. In sub- 
sequent years Dutchmen explored all New Jersey, 
eastern Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Coming up 
the Susquehanna valley, they first entered that 
wonderful lake country of fifteen or more bodies of 
water in central New York, from Oneida Lake to 
Silver Lake, containing rich forests full of fur-bear- 
ing animals. 



ORANGE, WHITE, AND BLUE IN HUDSON RIVER. 245 

Thus, from its outskirts to the far interior, the 
whole of New Netherland, the empire region, which 
afterward became our four Middle States, was ex- 
plored, and Dutch maps made of the region thus 
discovered and opened. One of the most noted 
maps, of 1614-15, which shows the country from 
Rhode Island to the Delaware River, is remarlcable 
for its knowledge of interior New York. It proves 
what Christiansen and Block did to make known 
America beyond the seacoast. In a word, the 
Dutchmen, although they had not yet settled a 
colony, as the English had done at Jamestown, did 
greatly enlarge European knowledge of the re- 
sources of the continent and of its physical geog- 
raphy. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

CAPTAIN block's EXPLORING CRUISE IN THE YACHT 

" RESTLESS." 

LET US see now what became of Captain Adriaen 
Block. While his comrade, Christiansen, was 
up in the Mohawk region. Block's ship, Tiger, caught 
fire and was burned to the water's edge ; but, undis- 
mayed, though with few and poor tools, and using 
chiefly the green wood of the forest, he built the 
first ship constructed on Manhattan Island, and 
christened it the Onrust {Restless). The little ship 
was launched in the springtime and made a splen- 
did record. Being only sixteen tons' burden. Block 
could take her into the rivers and streams where 
a larger vessel could not go. 

He first went up the East River to Hell Gate 
and threaded his way among the islands into Long 
Island Sound, which he explored on its northern 
shore. He passed a large river, to the region or 
valley of which he, or some later Dutchman, gave 
the name " Woesten Hoek," which means the cor- 
ner or place of the wilderness. In the Indian 
tongue, and as pronounced by the red man's lips, 

246 



CAPTAIN BLOCK'S EXPLORING CRUISE. 247 

when the English inquired its name, " Woesten 
Hoek " became " Housatonic." In one of the first 
large inlets, which was afterwards called New 
Haven harbor, he named the high ground Roden- 
burg, or Red Hill, the appropriateness of which 
any one will recognize who knows the vicinity of 
New Haven. He sailed into the Connecticut River 
and when he tasted the water, finding it so differ- 
ent from the brackish waters near New York and 
around Manhattan Island, he named it the Fresh 
River. The stream flowing into New Haven har- 
bor he named the river of the Red Hill. He located 
the country of the Mohicans, and finding another 
river of sweet water, most probably the Pawtucket, 
he marked it on his map as being fresh. Then 
noticing the coast bend away to the northward, he 
steered over to an island rising out of the sea, 
which he called Block Island, which name it bears 
to-day. He probably explored the coast as far 
as Point Judith. Either he or later Dutchmen 
gave the region the name of Red Island, or Rood 
Eylandt, which in English is pronounced Rhode 
Island. The result of Block's explorations was 
to show that the land stretching out eastward from 
New York was an island. 

He now entered Narragansett Bay, and finding 
it large and roomy, with a broad outlook, he named 
it Nassau Bay. He gave names to several more 



248 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

of the islands, and then passed along that tremen- 
dous extension of Massachusetts, east of Buzzard's 
Bay, which looks like a doubled-up arm as though 
this grand state was showing the thickness of her 
muscle. As in the geography, so in the seal and 
arms of the commonwealth, above the standing 
Indian, is the bent arm sheathed in armor. The 
Dutch skipper rounded Cape Cod and then struck 
over to the opposite coast, reaching Nahant, Marble- 
head harbor, and Salem Inlet, which he called Pye 
Bay. 

Nearly all of Block's discoveries have been ruth- 
lessly wiped out or altered by English settlers 
except the name of the island which he discovered. 
In Narragansett Bay, between Kingston County 
and Jamestown, is the little Dutch Island. 

Captain May, whose vessel had been fitted out 
at Hoorn, the town which sent out both the ship 
and the man who discovered and named Cape 
Horn in South America, had taken the Fortune 
and had explored the southern coast of Long Island, 
which he found to be twenty-five Dutch miles long, 
from Visscher's Hoek, now called Montauk Point, 
to Manhattan Island. Visscher's name survives in 
an altered form in Fisher's Island, which belongs to 
New York. May also went along the coast of New 
Jersey, and he or later Dutchmen named Cape May 
and Cape Henlopen. The latter is the namesake 



CAPTAIN BLOCK'S EXPLORING CRUISE. 249 

of a pretty little town called Hindeloopen, or the 
running hind, which nestles behind the dikes of 
the Zuyder Zee. 

When Block started for Manhattan, he met the 
ship Fortune, in command of Cornelius Hendrikson, 
on its way to Holland. He exchanged ships, direct- 
ing Hendrikson to continue the double business of 
trading for furs and making geography, while he 
crossed the Atlantic to report the explorations of 
himself, of Christiansen, and of May. These reports 
with the " figurative map " he laid before the gov- 
ernment, which sat in the district of The Hague, 
w^here the Congress of the United States sat. 

In March of this very year, the Dutch Congress, 
to stimulate enterprise and promote exploration, had 
issued a general charter for those who " discovered 
new passages, havens, countries, or places." Each 
discoverer was to be rewarded by being given a 
monopoly of trade to the country he should dis- 
cover, during at least four voyages. He was re- 
quired within fourteen days from the return from 
his first voyage to give his report, with exact details 
of the work which he had accomplished. 

It was on October ii, 1614, that Block presented 
himself before the States-General, in one of those 
rooms which overlook the Binnenhof in The Haeue. 
There he was able to prove that he had added vastly 
to Henry Hudson's discovery and had opened new 



250 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

countries. What Block showed was so far beyond 
what Captain John Smith had yet discovered, that 
a resolution was moved and carried to grant a char- 
ter to a company of merchants, which, some months 
before, on the iSth of July, had asked for the privi- 
lege of exclusive trade with America and Africa. 
Block's arguments won the day, and the charter 
was signed and sealed before sundown. In token of 
the unity of the United States of the Netherlands, 
— e pluribiis ttiiimi, — the new region was called 
officially not New Netherlands-, as most English 
writers have it, but New Netherland. 

Curiously enough, on that same day. Captain John 
Smith, in England, was showing Prince Charles his 
journal and map of the region between Penobscot 
Bay and Cape Cod. He who became King Charles I. 
proposed the name New England, which was given. 
In Block's idea. New Netherland extended from the 
forty-fifth degree of north latitude to the Penobscot, 
beyond which was New France. 

Meanwhile the Dutch, who were getting ac- 
quainted with the interior of northern New York, 
kept up their fort on Castle Island, in the Hudson, 
until a flood in 1617 nearly ruined it. Then Eelkins 
selected a spot at the junction of Normans Kill 
with the Hudson River. This beautiful winding 
stream took its name from a Northman or Scandi- 
navian who had cultivated land there. The Indian 



CAPTAIN BLOCK'S EXPLORING CRUISE. 25 1 

name was Tawasentha, meaning the place of many 
dead. For many generations this spot had been 
sacred as being not only their burying-place, but 
the eastern limit of the Iroquois confederacy. Near 
by rose a hill on the northern bank, called Tawas- 
gunshee, whence a view over the river valley could 
be obtained. Here the next year, in 1618, was held 
a great council of the five Indian tribes of the 
confederacy, whose long house, or residence, ex- 
tended from the falls of Cohoes to those of NiaQ:ara. 
With solemn ceremonies, these senators of the forest 
formed, with the commander and officers of the 
Fort Nassau, a treaty of friendship and an alliance 
of mutual helpfulness. This league of peace, be- 
tween the Dutch and Indians, became, in the course 
of American history, one of the primal elements 
which decided the fate of this continent for Anolo- 
Saxon civilization. Like a great dike, against 
which the waves of French energy and ambition 
beat in vain, it stood until the Indian ceased to be 
a political factor in the struggle. After Eelkins, it 
was remade and ratified by Arendt van Curler. 
It became that " silver chain " which was never 
broken until the English-speaking white men them- 
selves quarrelled and separated. 

The two significant ceremonies were the burial 
of the war-hatchet and the mutual drinkinor of the 
smoke of peace. The Indians laid a tomahawk 



252 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

upon the loose ground and the chiefs repeatedly 
trampled and trod it down, pushing earth over it 
until it was no longer visible. Then the calumet or 
pipe was filled with tobacco, passed around, and 
solemnly smoked by red and white men. 

There are few more interesting historic sites in 
America than Tawasentha, near Albany. Here, 
according to Indian tradition, was the seat of the 
labors of their culture-hero Hiawatha, whom Long- 
fellow has celebrated. Not far away lived and 
wrought the Indian's friend, Arendt van Curler, 
one of America's great men. He was so true a 
friend of the Five Nations, that they named the 
governors of New York after him — Corlear. The 
" Covenant of Corlear," so often referred to in Ind- 
ian oratory, is not yet forgotten. Even the title 
which the Canadian Iroquois to this day give Queen 
Victoria, the Empress of India, is " The Great 
Curler" (Kora Kowa). The Iroquois, who hated 
Champlain, called the body of w^ater in northern 
New York, Corlear's Lake, and the bay near which 
he was drowned in 1657, Corlear's Bay. 

The little ship Restless was not yet at the end 
of its career of usefulness. In 161 5, Captain Cor- 
nelius Hendrikson sailed in her around the coast 
of New Jersey. To one place he gave the name 
Eyerhaven, that is the haven of eggs, which is cor- 
rect old English as well as good Dutch. It is now 



CAPTAIN BLOCK'S EXPLORING CRUISE. 253 

called Egg Harbor. He gave the name Henlopen 
to what is now called Cape May, and to the point 
opposite, Cape Cornelius, though these names were 
afterwards changed. He went up into the beautiful 
Delaware Bay, until he found that, like that which 
Hudson had discovered, it narrowed and became 
a river. In sailing up past where Philadelphia now 
is, he reached perhaps as far as Trenton. He or 
some one after him named the Delaware's principal 
affluent, the Schuylkill, that is, the hidden kill or 
stream. 

The Great Truce was to end in 1621, and then 
war with Spain would begin again, and the Dutch 
would have opportunity to colonize New Nether- 
land, if they wanted to. Yet there was little induce- 
ment to a Dutchman to leave his home permanently. 
For discovery or exploration, trade or commerce, 
thousands of young Dutchmen, brave, enterprising, 
and brainy, were ready to sail into any seas or to 
go to either pole, but not to stay forever away from 
their homeland. There was plenty of room in the 
republic and no overcrowding, for until 1620 there 
were less than a million people in the seven states 
of the Union. 

Being a free land, where there was liberty of con- 
science for all men, there was no need of going else- 
where for worship in peace. The Dutch were not 
Pilgrims, because they had no need to be. Their 



254 ^^^ ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

toleration and freedom had been already won. Yet^ 
besides the Separatists, called Anabaptists, and the 
Jews, driven out by the bigotry of persecuting state 
churches, both Protestant and Catholic, there were 
many Huguenots and British folks living in Holland. 
These people were not rooted to the soil, but dwelt 
as strangers in a strange land, whose language and 
customs they but partially knew. It was easy for them 
to go out as colonists to the new world, especially 
when, if they returned home to England or France, 
they would probably be at once clapped into prison. 
When the Great Truce should be over in 1621, 
there would be a fine opportunity for these Walloons 
or French Protestants, or the English Separatists 
from Yorkshire, to make homes in New Netherland. 
By the year 1620, Barneveldt, who had opposed colo- 
nization, was dead, and the Arminian political party 
or State-Sovereignty men had lost their power. 
Maurice, the president of the republic of the Dutch 
United States, received a petition from the direc- 
tors of the New Netherland company who traded 
with the Hudson River region and who now wanted 
to colonize it. These gentlemen said that there 
was an English preacher in Leyden who knew the 
Dutch language very well, and who stated that not 
fewer than four hundred families, both out of Hol- 
land and England, were inclined to go to New 
Netherland to live. 



CAPTAIN BLOCK'S EXPLORING CRUISE. 255 

The directors recommended that these people, 
who were no other than Rev. John Robinson, Elder 
Brewster, William Bradford, and the Pilgrim fathers, 
mothers, and children, should be aided in transport- 
ing themselves to America to settle in the Hudson 
River region. The directors had promised to give 
them free passage to America, and to furnish every 
family with cows and animals for their farms ; but, 
as there was danger from their own cruel King 
James and from the Spaniards, they recommended 
that two ships of the Dutch navy be sent to convoy 
the squadron of colonists to New Netherland. 

This petition of the Dutch directors looked very 
reasonable from the point of view of plain patriots 
and business men, or even of Eno-lish refuo^ees who 
wanted a home where the iron hands of the harsh 
kings, James I. of England and Philip III. of Spain, 
could not reach them. James, the fool-king, had put 
old Sir Walter Raleigh to death, and was now trying 
to make a match for his daughter with a Spanish 
prince. These Englishmen could not trust their 
" dread sovereign " not to harass or murder them. 

To the political men in the States-General, how- 
ever, the matter of helping English colonists who 
were under the ban of their bishops and politicians 
looked very different. Though the Dutch United 
States had declared themselves independent of Spain, 
and had won a twelve years' truce, their freedom was 



256 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

not yet fully assured. Spain, now rich and strong 
again, was to open a war next year, and every man 
and ship, every pike, gun, and cartridge, were needed 
for home defence. On the other hand, the Dutch 
had defied and irritated King James, because this 
monarch's intermeddling in Dutch affairs had be- 
come intolerable. They also had given offence to 
the political church of England by harboring and 
protecting the English refugees who were Separa- 
tists. The Dutch government had to be politic and 
cautious. They tried to keep King James in good 
humor, and professed to heed his remonstrances. 
Indeed, they could not wholly break friendship 
with the only other great Protestant Power in 
Europe. 

Furthermore, the English were already hinting at 
and professing the preposterous claim that because 
Henry Hudson was an Englishman, his discoveries 
belonged to England, though he was a servant of 
a Dutch company under the Dutch flag, and in a 
Dutch ship with Dutch sailors. This same argu- 
ment would have handed over the fruits of John and 
Sebastian Cabot's discoveries to Italy. Still, while 
there was even the shadow of a question, or an inch 
of ground for the wavering British king to stand on, 
it would have been the worst kind of policy for the 
Dutch to send, as their first colony, a company of 
people whom the English government and church 



CAPTAIN BLOCK'S EXPLORING CRULSE. 257 

had persecuted and hated. It would have looked 
like open defiance. 

So the States-General were obliged to deny the 
petition of the Dutch directors, and to disappoint 
the Pilgrims in their hope of settling in New 
Netherland under friendly and generous patronage 
and beneath a republican flag. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

THE BOURBON LILIES IN CANADA. CHAMPLAIn's 
DECISIVE SHOT. 

WHEN the sixteenth century dawned, there 
were a good many motives to impel men to 
sail westward from Europe. 

Besides the India spices and the American lodes, 
there were the vast treasures of the deep and the 
wealth in sea-food, which were not likely to be ex- 
hausted like gold or silver mines. The great cur- 
rents coming up from the overheated water around 
the Equator and in the Gulf of Mexico is like the 
Nile River, which brings down out of the heart of 
Africa a top-dressing which enriches Egypt's fields. 
The Gulf Stream carries silt and animal life and 
matter, upon which the cod and other deep-sea fish 
feed, and makes a rich deposit on the Grand Banks 
off Newfoundland. Here during the ages billions 
of fish have accumulated in their generations, like 
mines in the water, storing up food for those nations 
of western Europe, whose religion requires the con- 
sumption of a great deal of fish on certain days. 

Not only was it thought not the proper thing to 

258 



THE BOURBON LILIES IN CANADA. 259 

eat meat on Friday, but when the saints and holy 
days multiplied, there were at least three days in 
every week when fish dinners were necessary. This 
demand, both religious and commercial, gave the 
fishermen along the coast of France plenty to do, 
besides opportunities for wealth and stimulus to 
enterprise. It is highly probable that before the 
days of Columbus, French fishermen from St. 
M'alo and Dieppe had sailed directly across the 
ocean and fished on the Grand Banks, without 
ever troubling their heads about exploration and 
geography. 

After the different French provinces had become 
one great kingdom, and peace existed between the 
nations on either side of the Pyrenees, it was easy 
to send out Jacques Cartier, who entered the great 
river of St. Lawrence. He also ascended to Mon- 
treal and named it. Yet France furnished no 
important successors of Cartier in the line of ex- 
ploration until, in Samuel Champlain, the man was 
found who began New France in America. Under 
the popular King Henry IV. the illustrious House 
of Bourbon was established on the throne of France. 

The white lilies were the emblem of the Bour- 
bons, and from 1689 to 1792 theirs was the flag of 
France. It was these white lilies that were borne 
with the stars and stripes to victory at Yorktown 
in 1781. 



260 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Champlain's first voyage was made In 1603. His 
explorations, begun in the region of the river and 
gulf of St. Lawrence, were continued during two 
summers along the coast of Maine. He entered 
the Penobscot and the Kennebec rivers and into 
Saco Bay. He visited Boston harbor, Cape Cod, 
and Nausett harbor, in what is now Massachusetts. 
In 1605, he again traversed the same line of sum- 
mer exploration, making his maps in winter. A 
feeble colony had also been attempted on Nova 
Scotia. After three years and four months of noble 
pioneer exploration, Champlain reached France 
again to tell his story not only by word of mouth, 
but in books which were widely read and richly 
enjoyed. 

When the colonists who had settled at Port 
Royal arrived at St. Malo early in October, and the 
specimens of grain, corn, wheat, rye, barley, oats, 
and other products were shown the king, Henry 
IV., His Majesty was greatly pleased. Champlain 
was made governor of another expedition sent out 
in 1608, when he laid the foundations of the city of 
Quebec. 

In the terrible winter which followed, twenty out 
of the twenty-eight men died from cold and disease. 
The Frenchmen, coming from a mild climate like 
that of France, were illy prepared to face a Cana- 
dian winter. Instead of a real colony, this was after 



THE BOURBON LILIES IN CANADA. 26 1 

all but a fur-trading post, and so it remained for a 
quarter of a century, during which time the popu- 
lation never numbered over one hundred persons. 

Champlain was not satisfied in keeping a few 
Frenchmen in order and bartering trinkets and 
tools for Indian furs. His dream was of a New 
France. He wanted to see the great region of 
mighty rivers and inland seas developed and made 
full of happy homes and farms, to the enrichment 
of his sovereign and country. He had a king worth 
serving, Henry IV., who had not yet been pierced 
by the dagger of the assassin Ravaillac. When 
Champlain asked the Indians near Quebec to pilot 
him on his explorations, they declared themselves 
quite willing to do so, but only on the condition 
that he should help them and fight for them, if at- 
tacked by the Iroquois. Perhaps Champlain's brain 
was too busy with the idea of exploration to con- 
sider fully the effect of taking sides in Indian war- 
fare. On the other hand, perhaps, he deliberately 
purposed to make the Algonquins his allies and the 
Iroquois his enemies. 

In the centuries before the red man had pos- 
sessed the guns and powder of Europeans, his war- 
fare and his industries were quite different from 
those of later days. His ancient weapons were 
bows, arrows, and spears. Besides shooting or hurl- 
ing missiles, he wore armor usually made of bark 



262 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

or hide. While ever ready for ambuscade and sur- 
prise, his frequent method of fighting was by bands 
in the open field ; or, at least, much more so than 
in later times, when he could get a gun and fire 
from behind a tree. With the introduction of mus- 
kets, the old methods of fighting in mass on open 
grounds passed away, though his cunning tricks 
and ambuscades, which are very ancient, have never 
been given up. 

When the summer was well opened in 1609, ^^^ 
while Henry Hudson in his Dutch ship was sailing 
toward the Hudson River, to get within less than 
a hundred miles of Champlain and his party, the 
three Frenchmen having arquebuses accompanied 
the sixty Indians. These were allied Algonquin 
and Huron warriors in birch-bark canoes, armed 
with flint-headed arrows and spears, and equipped 
with bark and skin armor. They moved up the St. 
Lawrence River, and entering the river Richelieu 
went southward along its western shore and, by the 
lake which now bears Champlain's name, into the 
territory of New York. Paddling deliberately and 
warily past the sites of Rouse's Point, Plattsburg, 
and Port Henry, the Algonquins kept ever on the 
lookout for their unsleeping enemy, the Iroquois. 
In the event of a battle, the allied Indians felt sure 
that with the three white men and their firearms 
they would surely win the victory. 



THE BOURBON LILIES IN CANADA. 263 

The human beasts of prey were not disappointed. 
About two hundred Iroquois from the Mohawk 
tribe had come up from the region of Schenectady, 
and were lying in wait at Ticonderoga, hoping that 
some party of their northern enemies would be 
coming down on the warpath. It w^as on the even- 
ing of the 29th of July, 1609, that the canoes of the 
southerners were discovered, but battle was post- 
poned until the next morning. Then both parties 
being ready and eager, Champlain, dressed in his 
helmet and jacket of steel, with stout leather trou- 
sers and greaves, wearing his sword in his belt, put 
himself at the head of the Algonquins, and moved 
out to the attack. He directed his two Frenchmen 
to go into the woods in order to take the Mohawks 
in the flank. He had loaded his gun with two 
balls. When within arrow range he fired, killing 
two chiefs and wounding another Iroquois. About 
the same time the two Frenchmen opened fire, 
while the Canadian savages sent showers of arrows. 

All this was so new and strange to the Mohawks, 
that they probably thought the gods had come to 
fight with their enemies against them. They saw 
men holding at their shoulders what seemed to be 
sticks sending out lightning and thunder. Then, 
without any apparent cause, for no arrows or spears 
were visible, they beheld their bravest companions 
lying dead and wounded. All this so demoralized 



264 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

them that when the enemies screeched out their 
yell of victory, the Mohawks retreated in panic. 
They left canoes, bows and arrows, and every- 
thing behind, and took to the woods, but not before 
ten of their number had been seized as prisoners. 
Hardly able to restrain their joy, the savages from 
Canada gathered up the spoil, and after tying 
their captives, enjoyed the usual dances. Like cats, 
they were happy at the idea of having prey to 
torment. 

Then they turned back and northward down the 
lake, stopping every once in a while to cook their 
food. They used hot coals and other means of 
inflicting pain, in order to make the prisoners of 
war suffer as horribly as possible. Indeed, their 
refinement of torture seemed more suitable to the 
Inquisition than to rude savagery. Champlain tried 
to dissuade them, but to the savage such customs 
formed part of his nature and religion, and an Indian 
would no more change them than the Pope would 
alter a church doctrine without a council. 

In his exultation at beating the Mohawks, Cham- 
plain was quite ready to return at once to France; 
and this he did, arriving on the 13th of October. 
He told the King how he had discovered and sur- 
veyed nearly the whole length of the beautiful 
island-studded lake that lies between the Adiron- 
dacks and the Green Mountains, all of which 



THE BOURBON LILIES IN CANADA. 265 

domain he had, by the right of discovery, added to 
the realm governed by the House of Bourbon. 

In 161 1 and 1612, Champlain visited France to 
report progress. In 16 14, he explored the Ottawa 
River. In 161 5, he built a chapel at Quebec, and 
gave it in charge of missionaries whom he had per- 
suaded to come over to New France. From this 
time forth, the black-robed friars and fathers become 
prominent figures in the annals of American explo- 
ration and history. 

Although Champlain never saw the Great Lakes, 
about which the Indians told him, and which he so 
earnestly longed to be the first white man to look 
upon, yet his life was one of singular adventure. 
He crossed the Atlantic several times. With his 
Algonquin allies, he commanded in a second battle 
on Lake Champlain, in which the Iroquois were 
again beaten. In 161 5, he made a journey of nearly 
two thousand miles, on foot and in canoe, into 
central New York, going by way of the Ottawa 
River and Lakes Huron and Ontario. The object 
of the host of allied Indians, which he accompanied, 
was to assault the great six-sided fort of the Iro- 
quois built near Lake Onondaga. This large war 
expedition was a failure, and Champlain was 
wounded. The disappointed army of savages, 
made up from many Canadian tribes, recrossed 
Lake Ontario. While the red men hunted deer, 



266 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Champlain studied the country and the native 
inhabitants. 

Champlain must be ranked in the first class of 
American explorers. He had carried the lilied 
banners of France far into the territory of what are 
now the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and Montreal 
in the Dominion of Canada and the Empire State 
of New York, as well as along the Atlantic coast 
from Labrador to Cape Cod. When he began his 
work of examining new lands and waters, there was 
no European settlement in eastern North America 
between Greenland and Mexico, and no exploration 
of a scientific character had yet been done between 
Hudson's and Chesapeake Bay. It is true that 
navigators had sailed along the coast and noticed 
the headlands and great bays, and even the Eng- 
lishmen Gosnold and Pring had touched upon the 
shores, but Champlain was their first real explorer. 
He surveyed nearly a thousand miles of seacoast, 
and his maps were of immense value. These, be- 
sides being pretty fair representations of the land 
and water visited, have on them accurate and 
properly located drawings of the fish, animals, vege- 
tables, and trees. Champlain's descriptions of the 
Indians of the United States and Canada, before 
they were influenced by the white man, are not 
only the first, but they are of the highest value. 

On Christmas Day, 1635, Champlain, in the little 



THE BOURBON LILIES IN CANADA. 267 

fort on the rocky heights of Quebec, breathed his 
last. For thirty-two years he had devoted himself 
with heroic constancy to plant the flag of France in 
America, and to increase the knowledge of the world 
concernino; northeastern North America. The work 
did not cease with him, but was carried on by two 
very different classes of men, the Jesuit fathers and 
the wood-rangers. 

The former, ministers of religion, educated, re- 
fined, consecrated, noble, self-denying men, have left 
behind them records of priceless value. From 1632, 
the black-robed friars of the Society of Jesus — 
the Salvation Army of that day — sent home to 
their general accounts of their missionary work, 
including their travels. These writings were edited 
with care and published in Paris. For sixty-one 
years from 1632 until 1693, when Frontenac stopped 
the reports from Canada, a duodecimo volume of 
" Relations," well printed and bound in vellum, 
dropped annually from the printing-press of Sebas- 
tian Cramoisy in Paris. These were reprinted in 
Italy. Read at Court and by noblemen and people 
interested in religion and patriotism, these little 
volumes were awaited as eagerly as to-day we look 
for the morning journal, or the story-paper or maga- 
zine in which is a serial "to be continued." Their 
authors travelled on foot or travailed in spirit in 
Canada or Louisiana. To-day these volumes are 



268 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

invaluable as a storehouse of material for the histo- 
rian, for much of what we know was made possible 
by the Jesuits. 

The French wood-rangers, on the contrary, did 
not, as a rule, know how to read or write. They 
have told no story of their wonderful journeys into 
the virgin forest, over Indian trails, and on waters 
never traversed by white men till they paddled their 
canoes over their surfaces. A large part of Ameri- 
can exploration was done honorably by these plain, 
rough, unlettered men. 

Champlain probably never knew what a train of 
influences he had set in motion by that one shot at 
Ticonderoga. In reality, by a single act he had 
made it impossible for the French to keep their 
foothold in America. He did not know what a 
powerful confederacy that of the Iroquois was, and 
that their faithfulness to the Dutch and English 
would be fatal to French dominion in America. As 
it was, the Mohawks, within a generation, armed 
themselves with Dutch guns and powder. When 
Champlain died, they were able to stop for a while 
both the fur trade and further French exploration. 
Champlain's shot drew the boundary line between 
two civilizations. Without knowing it, he rang the 
knell of French hopes. In the historian's eyes, his 
bullet pricked the dream-bubble of New France. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

LA SALLE SEEKS CHINA AND DISCOVERS THE 
MISSISSIPPI. 

ONE of the most important and striking features 
of the North American continent is that system 
of great fresh-water seas or lakes, drained by the 
St. Lawrence River, which conveys their overflow to 
the sea. There is nothing else on earth quite like 
this orreat reservoir of fresh water in the heart of a 
continent, unless it be the vast unsalted seas in the 
interior of Africa which supply the Nile River. 
Forming part of the northern boundary of the 
United States, and the seat of the greatest inland 
water commerce in the w^orld, the names of the 
first explorers of the Great Lakes ought to be familiar 
to every American boy. 

If we look at that plateau of land west of Lake 
Superior, we shall find the fountains of the Missis- 
sippi, the St. Lawrence, and the Red River, three 
great streams which water the continent east of the 
Rocky Mountains. These empty into the Gulf of 

Mexico, the North Atlantic, and Hudson's Bay, re- 

269 



2/0 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

spectively. For ages the Indians had glided down 
the St. Lawrence River, using it as their chief trade- 
route, exchanging the red stone pipes, copper, and 
aeate arrow-heads of the far West for the sea-shells, 
salt, and other articles from the ocean's shore. 
When Champlain came to Canada and saw the 
copper and the furs, his imagination was powerfully 
stirred. In prophetic vision he beheld this great 
river made the highway of a nobler and richer 
commerce. 

The Frenchmen who survived the climate of 
Quebec took rather kindly to the Indian ways of 
life. They soon became very much like their sav- 
age allies, in habits, dress, food, and love of the 
forest and of outdoor life. Tough, alert, and in love 
with wild adventure, they enjoyed life in a birch- 
bark canoe, with alternate campings out and voyag- 
ing into the lands of the beaver and buffalo. Sitting 
by the roaring fire at night, under the stars, with 
the solemn trees for a background and the bright 
waters mirroring the jewelled skies before them, they 
loved to sing songs, to tell stories, and to hear the 
Indians recount the lore of their ancestors and 
their white comrades narrate their experiences. The 
legends of the red men were ever fascinating to those 
white men of the woods. Even before the death of 
Champlain, Brule had penetrated the region west 
of Lake Huron. Another voyageur in 1634 pad- 



LA SALLE SEEKS CHINA, DISCOVERS MLSSISSIPPL. 27 1 

died through Mackinaw Strait and discovered Lake 
Michigan. 

For nearly twenty years after Champlain's death, 
in 1635, all French exploration and even the fur 
trade ceased on account of the Iroquois scourge. 
Having possessed themselves of guns and powder 
from the Dutch, the savage men of the Long House 
in New Netherland were able to fill almost the 
whole continent with terror. The storehouses at 
Quebec and the trading stations were empty. The 
Algonquin Indians scarcely dared to go out beyond 
their fortified villages, to hunt in the woods, for fear 
of the musketry of the Iroquois. Not until 1654, 
when peace between the French and the Five Na- 
tions was made, do we find that either the fur trade 
or exploration was revived. 

Then, the way being clear, two Frenchmen, 
Chouart and Radisson, went out into the Great 
Lake region and pushed on beyond Lake Superior 
and wintered with the Sioux Indians among the 
thousand lakes of Minnesota, — the region of sky- 
tinted waters. They heard of a great stream, as 
grand as the St. Lawrence, called the Father of 
Waters. When these men arrived at Quebec in 
midsummer of 1660, with three hundred Indians 
and a fleet of sixty canoes ladened with finest furs, 
there was great rejoicing in the little colony. All 
the white settlers in New France were mightily 



272 THE ROMANCE OE DISCOVERY. 

stirred by the stories of those wonderful lands so 
rich in bison, beaver, sable, and ermine, and of 
strange Indians whose speech and customs were 
so different from those of the Hurons and the 
Algonquins. 

From that time on, various parties of adventur- 
ous fur traders penetrated into Wisconsin, and some 
of them probably got as far as the Mississippi. 
Among many big enemies, the little mosquito, no 
larger than an interrogation point, proved one of 
the most annoying obstacles to exploration. 

A new governor. Talon, arrived in 1665. He be- 
gan his work so eagerly that many hoped the white 
banners of France would soon float in the far 
West. During the summer his deputy, St. Lus- 
son, with Louis Joliet, raised the French flag at 
Sault Ste. Marie and took possession of the Lake 
Superior region, while Courcelles went exploring 
in person, through woods and waters, finding no 
enemies worse than mosquitoes. He established 
a fur-trading post on Lake Ontario, hoping thus to 
draw away the Iroquois from bartering their furs 
at Albany. 

The copper mines of Lake Superior were still 
unvisited by any white man, but in 1669, Louis 
Joliet, an active and lively wilderness-rover, appears 
on the scene. This man, after many adventures, 
was commissioned by Governor Frontenac, who 



LA SALLE SEEKS CHINA, DISCOVERS MISSISSIPPI. 2/3 

arrived in 1672, to explore the Father of Waters. 
JoHet had for his companions the noble Father 
Marquette and five fellow wood-rangers ready for 
new adventures. Joliet spent the winter of 1672 in 
catechising all the Indians he could meet who had 
ever been on the great river. 

On May 17, 1673, he and his companions began 
a canoe voyage, going up the Fox River. They 
pulled out their boats at what is Portage City and 
put them on their backs. Then, like snails that 
carry their own houses, they walked two miles and, 
reaching the Wisconsin River, loaded again and 
dropped down the stream. After one month from 
their start, on June 17, the high bluffs of the Mis- 
sissippi rose before them. They paddled down 
past the Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas affluents. 
Satisfying himself that this great stream flows into 
the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Pacific, Joliet 
returned by way of the Illinois River, passing by 
the site of Chicago up Lake Michigan to Green 
Bay and thence to Quebec. 

Joliet took many notes, but unfortunately he 
lost his manuscripts when in sight of home, and 
but fifteen minutes before he landed, by the sink- 
ing of a canoe in the river. Nevertheless, he pre- 
pared a map and a narrative from memory. He 
had not found a waterway to the Pacific Ocean, 
but he had shown that by making but two portages 



274 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

between the mouth of the St. Lawrence and the 
Gulf of Mexico, one could traverse all New France 
in a canoe. Joliet wanted to go again, but he was 
never able to get into the Mississippi valley ; for 
La Salle, jealous of all intruders into his chosen 
grounds, had him kept out of this region. Joliet 
was rewarded by being appointed royal hydrogra- 
pher and was given the island of Anticosti. 

Marquette, after whom a city has been named, 
won the confidence of the Indians. He was a good 
type of those Jesuit missionaries who were tireless 
travellers, fond of exploration and of the new and 
wonderful life in the new continent. He had es- 
tablished missions at Mackinaw, Sault Ste. Marie, 
and Green Bay. Some of these consecrated men 
went from tribe to tribe, carrying on their backs 
little portable altars, with breviary, candles, and the 
most necessary things for the peculiar services of 
the Roman form of Christianity. Their vehicle 
was the birch-bark canoe, which carried them when 
they were on the water, and which they carried 
when they were on land. 

Time and space would fail to fell of all the 
French explorers DuLhut, Hennepin, Tonti, and a 
host of others, who took part in making known the 
Great Lake region, the headwaters of the Missis- 
sippi, and the heart of British America. Perhaps 
like all great works that are evolutions, rather than 



LA SALLE SEEKS CILLNA, DLSC OVERS M/SSLSSLPPL 2/5 

inventions, — printing, gunpowder, the steam en- 
gine, the telegraph, the landscape of England, an 
ocean steamer, — the best part of the French, 
Spanish, Dutch, and British exploration of this 
continent has been the work of unknown men. 
The "Great Unnamed" of history, as in holy script- 
ure, are more numerous than those of name and 
fame. 

The greatest figure in the French exploration of 
America, looming up above all others, is that of 
Robert Cavelier la Salle. His first and last idea 
was to make France great. His consuming am- 
bition was reenforced by a magnificent physique, a 
powerful brain, and an active will. He would serve 
king and country, first by finding the route to 
China throucfh French-American dominions, and 
next by extending New France until it should 
cover all the North American continent wxst of 
the Alleghanies. Arriving in Montreal in 1666, he 
began immediately to study the Indian dialects and 
made w^onderful progress. 

After exploring the forests of northern Canada, 
he made up his mind that no road to the riches of 
China and Japan could be found in that direction. 
His astrolabe, which he lost in the Canadian woods, 
was picked up a few years ago, after a burial of two 
centuries ; even as one of his axes was recently 
found in a tree growing near the Mississippi River. 



276 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

Nor are these the only rehcs of the man who cut 
his name so deeply in American history. 

A band of the Seneca Indians from the region 
of southwestern New York visited his little settle- 
ment near Montreal and told him of waters that 
rose in their country, but which flowed into the salt 
sea, after one had paddled in drinkable water for 
many months. La Salle immediately began to 
think that this stream must empty into the Ver- 
milion Sea, or Gulf of California. If so, could he 
not make his path direct to the Oriental spice lands, 
besides trading with the Indians and getting rich 
along the way.^ This was in 1668-69. His im- 
agination fired, he started out at once. Going up 
the great ocean river of the St. Lawrence, he 
explored Lake Ontario and the St. Louis or 
Ohio River. He also got into the Illinois or some 
other affluent of the Mississippi, possibly even 
reaching the main stream, before Joliet and Mar- 
quette. Of this we are not certain, but La Salle 
was the discoverer of the Ohio and the Illinois 
rivers. 

There are two years of La Salle's life shrouded 
in mystery, during which, it is said, some of his 
men refused to follow him. They came back to 
the land near the rapids, nine miles above Mon- 
treal, and the people in derision nicknamed the 
place and the water here " La Chine," or China. In 



LA SALLE SEEKS CHINA, DISCOVERS MISSISSIPPI 2// 

our day, it is one of the delights of Canadian travel 
to shoot the Lachine rapids in a steamer. 

La Salle went back to France in 1674 and was 
there made a nobleman. Receiving the approval 
of the King, he started again to America to make 
his great exploration. He gained as a companion, 
Henri de Tonti, an Italian of remarkable ability, 
whose father's name is still preserved in the Ton- 
tine system of life insurance. Tonti's hand had 
been lost in the wars, but the surgeons had replaced 
the flesh and nerves by a mass of iron which served 
its owner handsomely, not only to pull and lift 
things, but also to rap the skulls of the savages 
when they were stupid or disobedient. Tonti was 
a brave and faithful helper of La Salle, and did much 
toward making his explorations successful and in 
opening the Great West to France. His name 
deserves higher honor than it has yet received. 

La Salle built a ship near Niagara, on Lake Erie, 
the waters of which had never before mirrored a 
sail, having floated only canoes. Li the Griffin, 
as this " canoe with wings " was called, he sailed to 
Mackinaw and sent back the ship for supplies. 
Then with his companions he paddled to near the 
southeast corner of Lake Michigan, where at St. 
Joseph's River they built a fort. Crossing the coun- 
try to the headwaters of the Kankakee, which flows 
into the Illinois, they floated down the stream, pass- 



278 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

ing over Marquette's route. At Utica they found 
corn, and below Peoria Lake wigwams, with Indians, 
who eave news from both north and south. 

La Salle, bitterly disappointed at not being 
promptly reenforced with supplies, built a stockade 
called Crevecour, or Broken Heart, near Peoria. 
Then he began the building of another ship of forty 
tons. Still the supplies had not come, and what 
should he do? He could not think of going to the 
Gulf of Mexico, much less to China, without mate- 
rials for barter and many other things necessary. 
The great-hearted leader actually resolved to walk 
all the way back to Canada, in the depth of winter, 
to o-et what he wanted. Over ice and snow, mud 
and thickets, flood and field, he made the thousand- 
mile passage in sixty-five days. 

While he was away. Father Hennepin started out 
to make explorations on his own account. He met 
with wonderful adventures, seeing and describing 
for the first time the Falls of St. Anthony and pass- 
ino- over the sites of Minneapolis and St. Paul. 
Hennepin had already seen and described the Falls 
of Niagara. Hennepin is the harlequin of French 
exploration, and either he or his editor has made 
books which make the historian laugh, because of 
their caricatures of fact and truth. 

While in Canada La Salle heard that his men 
had mutinied and scattered. He at once made the 



LA SALLE SEMKS CHINA, DISCOVERS MISSISSIPPI. 279 

journey back to the fort of the Broken Heart. He 
passed through the lUinois country to find black- 
ened ruins where there had been large villages of 
Indians. These had been attacked and slaughtered 
by the fierce Iroquois from New York, now so terri- 
ble with their guns. He found the fort in ruins, but 
he passed down to the mouth of the Illinois River, 
and saw the Mississippi. He then returned to Fort 
Miami on the St. Joseph's River. 

No obstacles could daunt this heroic soul. Nature, 
and man both white and red, seemed against him. 
He resolved to band together the western tribes 
against the Iroquois, and in 1681 came back to 
Illinois and formed the league. This was an en- 
largement of Champlain's policy, as Sir William 
Johnson's was of Van Curler's. Then he found 
Tonti and returned to Canada. 

Having secured new supplies, he once more, in 
the autumn of 16S1, faced westward. With sleds 
and canoes his party of fifty-four persons, civilized 
and savage, crossed the portage at Chicago. Now 
on runners, and now afloat, they worked their way 
down the Illinois River. On the 6th of February, 
1682, the whole party entered the ice-blocked Missis- 
sippi He named the river after Colbert, the great 
finance minister of Louis XIV. Waiting a week 
for the ice to clear away, they made their way south- 
ward to summer climes. 



28o THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

At the Chickasaw Bluffs, they drove in some 
palisades, and called it Fort Prudhomme after the 
ofBcer left in charge. At the mouth of the Arkan- 
sas, a three days' conference was held with the 
savages, and then on the 14th day of March, 1682, 
in the name of Louis XIV., King of France, fol- 
lowed the formal ceremony of taking possession of 
the heart of the continent. Smoking the calumet 
of peace with the Natchez Indians, visiting other 
tribes at various points, planting crosses on the 
shores and bluffs, passing the mouths of the rivers 
and the site of cities since famous, they kept on, 
until on April 6 the great lonely flood divided into 
three channels, in each of which went one section 
of the party commanded by La Salle, Tonti, and 
d'Antray, respectively. Reaching the salt air and 
water, they again united on land near the mouth, 
having spent nine weeks on the voyage down this 
wonderful stream. 

Landing, La Salle erected a cross and also a post, 
on which he fastened a metal plate bearing the 
royal shield resplendent with three fleur-de-lis or 
lily-heads, the arms of the Bourbon House of 
France. In the ground was buried one of those 
many leaden plates which La Salle deposited at 
various points between Lake Ontario and the Gulf 
of Mexico, and of which some have been found in 
our times, on which were engraved, " Louis, the 



LA SALLE SEEKS CHINA, DISCOVERS MISSISSIPPI 28 1 

Great, reigns." His French companions and Indian 
canoe' men fired off their guns and shouted "Vive 
le roi." In the name of the King of France, 
Louis XIV., he took possession of the whole terri- 
tory drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries 
— about as large as one-third of Europe. To all 
this great region, unmeasured and unexplored, he 
gave the name of Louisiana, in honor of Louis XIV. 
Then the grand old Latin hymn Vexilla Regis, 
a Forward — let the banners of the King advance," 
was sung, and another cheer for the King ended the 

ceremony. 

In explorations. La Salle had trodden the soil, 
threaded the waters, or passed through or along- 
side of probably a dozen great states of our Ameri- 
can Union. In his claim, he took possession of 
the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and 
all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, vil- 
lages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers 
"upon the assurance he had had" (by signs and 
grimaces chiefly, not a word of the French or Mis- 
sissippi Indians' language being mutually under- 
stood) that La Salle and these Frenchmen were 
"the first Europeans who have descended or as- 
cended the said river " Colbert. He was particular 
to state that his possession had been " acquired by 
the consent of the nations dwelling therein." To- 
day we see how much the Mississippi had been al- 



282 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

ready discovered by Cabeza de Vaca, de Soto, Jollet, 
and very probably by others before La Salle. 

The rest of the story of New France in America 
belono;s to the romance of colonization and of con- 
quest. We need not here tell of the tragic death 
of La Salle, or the foundation of New Orleans and 
Mobile and their history. The French founded on 
this continent " a vast but transient empire " which 
is now a memory. Of the sixty forts which they 
built between Canada and Mexico, many are now 
the sites of American cities. The missions to the 
Indians failed with the failure of New France. 

Thus, while the English did next to nothing 
toward exploring the continent, still holding only 
their first settlements on the Atlantic coast, France 
was makintT known to the world the wonders and 
riches of the interior continent. It seemed to be 
the design of Providence to let two Latin peoples 
do the work of opening this country, in order that 
other tribes of the great Aryan race should come 
in to possess and colonize. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

NATIVE-BORN AMERICAN EXPLORERS OF THE EIGH- 
TEENTH CENTURY. 

IN the long struggle between the French and Eng- 
lish for the possession of the best portion of 
North America, the English people had the advan- 
tage. They held the coast and could easily be 
helped and reenforced from the mother-country. 
The colonists were protected on the north and west 
by their allies of the Iroquois confederacy. Best 
of all, with English ideas and representative gov- 
ernment, the people in the thirteen colonies were 
rooted in the soil. They were farmers and made 
homes, instead of being, as the French for the most 
part were, fur-traders, hunters, soldiers, and priests. 
Their organization was civil, that of the French 
military. During the eighteenth century, not only 
New France but much of New Spain disappeared 
from the area now covered by the United States. 

Of all the mighty domain over which the lilies 
of the House of Bourbon had floated, only two little 
islands off Newfoundland remained. These were 

allowed for the benefit of French fishermen. When, 

283 



284 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

during our Revolutionary War, King Louis XVI. 
and his able minister Count Vergennes lent our 
fathers aid in ships and sailors, officers, soldiers, and 
money, it was part of their scheme of European 
politics. They hoped to get back Canada. Wash- 
ington, John Adams, and Congress saw their pur- 
pose, and preferring English to French neighbors 
in the north, the campaign was made at Yorktown, 
and not at Quebec, as the French had desired. 

With the fall of New France, the eastern portion 
of New Spain fell also under Anglo-Saxon sway. 
Florida was given up to England after a Spanish 
possession of over two hundred and fifty years. 
Spain reaccepted Cuba in place of Florida and 
also her claims in the Pacific coast region of Van- 
couver Island and the north, in what is now British 
America. 

Very little had been done to explore the land of 
oranges and magnolias. But soon after Spain had 
made cession of the territory once named by Ponce 
de Leon, a Dutch officer named Romaine, a skilful 
engineer, began the exploration and survey of the 
country, while Vancouver was sent to the Pacific. 
Romaine spent some years learning about the hu- 
man beings and inhabitants of our most southern 
peninsular state. He wrote the first book in Eng- 
lish, and still one of the most important, about 
Florida. 



AMERICAN EXPLORERS OF THE i8th CENTURY. 285 

When the Revolutionary War broke out, Ro- 
maine left the service of Great Britain and entered 
that of the United States. Under Washinsrton's 
orders he built forts at West Point. He also 
composed a very valuable historical work which 
showed that the American revolution was justi- 
fied, and that the Americans were but following 
out the precedents already given in the Dutch 
war of independence against Spain, from 1568 to 
1648. 

The ground east of the Mississippi was now 
cleared of rival and hostile forces and the way made 
open for the union of all English colonies. 

In Florida the Spaniards had penetrated the 
country only a little and had but very slightly de- 
veloped its resources. They had made slaves of 
the Indians, but they had also sent many zealous 
missionaries among them, not a few of whom lost 
their lives. Negro slavery was begun in 1687. Set- 
tlements were made at Pensacola and a few other 
places. The Spaniards also introduced horses and 
cattle and orano^es. When EnQ^lish settlers came 
into the new country they found the soil wonder- 
fully fertile, which fact the Spaniards do not seem 
to have known. In 1783, Florida was again ceded 
back to Spain, — much to the disgust and loss of 
the English people living there. It was not until 
1822 that the United States flag was hoisted over 



286 THE ROMANCE OE DISCOVERY. 

Florida, and it became the permanent possession 
of the Union. 

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a 
famous one in the annals of exploration. Captain 
James Cook, who, as master of a sloop, had taken 
part in the capture of Quebec, observed in 1768 at 
Tahiti in the South Pacific the transit of Venus, 
which the Dutch-American astronomer Rittenhouse 
also observed at Philadelphia. Cook also visited 
New Zealand and explored the coast of New 
South Wales. In 1772, he sailed again with two 
ships, hoping to discover the Terra Australis, which 
was supposed to be a continent in the southern 
seas. Although he circumnavigated the globe, los- 
ing only one man and discovering New Caledonia, 
he did not find the imaginary continent, which must 
be classed with Antilia and the supposed lost con- 
tinent of Atlantis. 

There was another transit of Venus over the 
sun's disc on the 9th of December, 1774, the ele- 
ments for which were calculated by our own Ritten- 
house. The platform used by the astronomers 
stood in Independence Square in Philadelphia and 
was used during July, 1776, for the reading of the 
Declaration of Independence, which showed a new- 
born political star moving across the disc of history. 

In 1776, Cook sailed to explore Behring Strait. 
He discovered the Hawaii Islands, which were named 



AMERICAN EXPLORERS OF THE i8th CENTURY. 28/ 

after the Earl of Sandwich, who also gave his name 
to stratified refreshments. Cook was killed by the 
natives, but his lieutenant George Vancouver was 
ordered to follow up Cook's work. 

It was a grand day for Vancouver, who sailed on 
April I, 1 79 1. Even the name of his ship, the 
Discovery, showed how interested in exploration 
the British people and government had become. 
Among other officers with him were Lieutenant 
Puget, whose name is left on the great sound in our 
far northwest, and Broughton, after whom the great 
bay in Korea is named. Vancouver explored the 
Pacific coast from the thirtieth deQ:ree of north lati- 
tude to Cook's Inlet. He entered the waterways to 
see if the arm of the sea, named by Juan de Fuca 
nearly two centuries before, was only a strait, yet 
hoping to find a passage to the Great Lakes in 
British America. Vancouver's surveys were made 
with minute care. This illustrious officer is fitly 
remembered by the island which bears his name, 
whence noble steamers ply to Japan. 

In 1785, La Perouse the French explorer extended 
the bounds of our geographical knowledge by ex- 
ploring the northern Pacific coasts of America and 
Asia. He did not find the Northwest Passage. 
Though he and his companions lost their lives by 
wreck on a coral reef, he has left his name on the 
straits between Saghalien and Siberia. 



288 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

While the romance of discovery was being slowly 
written all over the earth by the brave men of 
Europe, and while their ships, like shuttles wove, 
as in tapestry, bright pictures of the triumph of 
science, the native American did his share of work 
also. 

In the eighteenth century there steps into history 
a new figure. It is that of the explorer born on the 
soil. He realizes that there is a struQ^Qrle croino: on 
between the great Powers of Europe for the posses- 
sion of this continent. New Netherland and New 
Sweden are no longer on the map. The question, 
whether he is to live in New Spain, New France, 
or New England, is still uncertain, though the Eng- 
lish-speaking colonists believe it is going to be a 
New England ; or, better, a new Europe. The 
Indian is of a great deal of importance as a political 
factor, and each Power is trying to get the red man 
as an ally and friend. The Spaniards do not show 
much tendency to advance further northward, but 
the Frenchmen seem determined to press up from 
Louisiana, and down from Canada, and to build a 
fence to keep back the Englishmen from crossing 
the Alleghany. In this they only partially succeed, 
for New England holds her own along the coast, 
being easily and quickly reenforced on the ocean 
from the mother country; while in New York and 
Pennsylvania, the Dutch and Germans toughly 



AMERICAN EXPLORERS OF THE iSth CENTURY. 289 

and perseveringly maintain their ground, powerfully 
aided by the Iroquois confederacy ; for Sir William 
Johnson, following up Van Curler's policy, by his 
skill and genius, keeps the Six Nations loyal to the 
British crown. In the South the new wealth from 
tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, slave labor, and the 
o-enius and enterprise of the English colonists, so 
nobly reenforced by the sterling qualities of the men 
of Huguenot and German stock, manifested both 
in defence and offence, keep the Spaniards from 
making further advancements. 

At such a time, appears the native-born Ameri- 
can frontiersman, explorer, Indian fighter, soldier, 
pioneer, and commonwealth builder. After him 
bands of pioneers press forward from Virginia 
and the Carolinas in Kentucky and Tennes- 



see. 



The pathfinder in this region is Daniel Boone, 

one of that splendid Pennsylvania German stock, 

which has furnished so much good blood to the 
country. Though there were other American path- 
finders in the eighteenth century, we may take this 
man as the typical explorer of his age. As early 
as 1750, Dr. Thomas Walker in behalf of the 
Loyal Company, and Captain Christopher Gist in 
behalf of the Ohio Company, passed through Ken- 
tucky in search of fertile lands. Before they could 
locate their claims and settle colonists, the two 



290 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

wars, the French and Indian, and the Revolution- 
ary came on to disturb their plans. 

Daniel Boone was born in Bucks County, Penn- 
sylvania, February 11, 1735. He went with other 
Germans down into North Carolina, where he mar- 
ried. In 1769, with five other young men he pene- 
trated a region south of the Ohio, then uninhabited 
by white men and covered with virgin forests. 
Like the Adirondack debatable land, between the 
Hurons and the Iroquois in northern New York, 
Kentucky was to the Indians " the dark and bloody 
ground." Boone and his companions made known 
the region now covered by Kentucky and Tennes- 
see, and began replenishing it and subduing it for 
the white race. 

In person and ideas, Daniel Boone was a very 
different character from the first white men who 
saw the land in 1541. The Spaniards under de 
Soto, in armor, with swords and spears and clumsy 
guns that were scarcely anything more than rude 
hand-cannons, touched Tennessee, where Memphis 
now stands. Over a century passed, and then the 
French, led by La Salle, came in Canadian dress, 
but with the banners and symbols of the Bourbons, 
and the emblems of a state or political church. 
Daniel Boone was dressed in hunting shirt, buckskin 
trousers and moccasins, with coon-skin cap. His 
gun was a flint-lock rifle. He had not, indeed, the 



AMERICAN EXPLORERS OF THE i8th CENTURY. 291 

splendid breech-loading rifle of to-day, with its 
almost mathematically perfect grooving, finely ad- 
justed sights, and waterproof metallic cartridges; 
yet his was a weapon of unerring power in the 
hands of a quick and keen-eyed sharp-shooter like 
himself. The Swiss of Pennsylvania brought the 
rifle to America; but Kentucky was the ground 
on which it was developed. Boone's explorations 
opened the country to settlers, whose sons took 
part in the battle of King's Mountain in the war of 
the Revolution. He died on his farm in Missouri, 
in 1820. 

George Rogers Clark was another typical Ameri- 
can frontiersman, who knew how to explore and 
survey, keep back the Indians, and pave the way 
for new commonwealths. He settled in Kentucky, 
weakened the power of the Shawnees, secured Illi- 
nois from the French, and wrested from the hostile 
Indians and British the posts at Kaskaskia and 
Vincennes. He thus enabled the American com- 
missioners, at the Peace Convention in 1783, to fix 
the western boundary of the United States at the 
Mississippi River instead of the Alleghany Moun- 
tains. 

In 1803, under President Jefferson, the United 
States government purchased from France and Na- 
poleon Bonaparte the whole region between the 
Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, all 



292 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

that was left, but still a mighty domain and the 
best part, of New France. The price paid was fif- 
teen millions of dollars. Neither Napoleon, nor 
Jefferson, nor any one else knew in detail very 
much about the newly bought region. So the next 
year the chief executive, Jefferson, sent out two com- 
petent men to report upon the new territory. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

NINETEENTH CENTURY EXPLORATIONS WEST OF THE 

MISSISSIPPI. 

THE nineteenth-century explorer who now ap- 
pears in view is of two different types. One 
is the frontiersman, rifleman, trapper, and hunter. 
Individually, or associated in small parties, he lives 
near or just beyond the border of civilization, seek- 
ing game and furs, leading parties of emigrants to 
their newly bought lands, or accompanying survey- 
ors who go to measure the wilderness and locate 
claims. He is a self-reliant, alert, and fearless per- 
son, who has learned a great deal from the Indians, 
their resources in war and peace, their tricks and 
ways ; but who, by means of superior intelligence 
and finer race-qualities, beats them on their own 
ground. Often he is as vindictive and cruel as he 
is rough and hardy; but whether as glorified and 
idealized by Cooper and the romancers, or as actual 
trangressor who falls into the clutch of army officer 
or magistrate, he possesses a fair balance of virtues 
and vices. Often he is kind and helpful, as gener- 
ous and as chivalrous as the knights who dressed in 

293 



294 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

silk and iron. Certainly he aids powerfully in the 
makinor of the United States. 

In the American frontiersman, there was no 
display of flaming banners or shining armor ; no 
dazzle of uniforms or emblems ; none of the ideas 
of a state church, of feudalism, of loyalty to king 
or pope, such as ruled the mind of his Spanish or 
French predecessors. He was in many respects 
just as much of a romantic figure, as truly a knight 
and protector of the weak and innocent, as strong 
a believer in the destiny of his race, as any of 
the cavaliers that had entered history before him. 
Very few of his kind now remain within the United 
States. With the banishing of the buffaloes, with 
the coming in of railways and telegraphs he, like 
the Indians, has dropped out of society, out of poli- 
tics, and out of use. He is no longer a part of the 
necessities and machinery of modern civilization. 

The other kind of explorer who has done so much 
to open the Great West which was sold by Napo- 
leon and bought by Jefferson, and to make straight 
the paths of civilization and Christianity, is the uni- 
formed United States military officer. Brave as a 
soldier, an explorer, and a pathfinder, he has been 
none the less a patriot and benefactor because he is 
a paid fighter. The American regular army officer 
is a noble figure in the romance of discovery. The 
whole vast space from the Gulf of Mexico and Old 



EXPLORATIONS WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 295 

California to Paget Sound and between the Rocky 
Mountains and the Pacific Ocean has been chano^ed 
from New Spain into states and territories of the 
American Union. The work of examining^ and 
pioneering this region has been all done during this 
century by the civil and military commissioners, ex- 
plorers, and surveyors, both topographical and geo- 
logical. These have looked upon, measured, and 
appraised in detail the western half of the continent ; 
while the sailors and naval officers have sounded, 
charted, and surveyed the ocean and shores. 

These servants of the United States government 
have told us the past history of the region west of 
the Father of Waters, reconstructing for us its won- 
derful marine and animal life. We have learned 
that a large portion of our western territory is an old 
ocean bed with islands rising out here and there, 
in the present form of plateaus and mountains. 
There are also caiions, parks, forests, lakes, water- 
falls, and unique wonders above and beneath the 
soil that surprise the world. By the vitalizing touch 
of imagination, as w^e stand within the National 
Museum at Washington, we see living again the 
strange and wonderful forms of animal life, that 
swam, leaped, or flew in earth, air, and sea, before 
ever a human being looked upon that strange 
region, so rich and promising, between the Rockies 
and the rim of the Pacific. 



296 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

The two explorers appointed by President Jeffer- 
son were Captain Meriwether Lewis, private secre- 
tary of President Jefferson and formerly of the 
regular army, and Captain William Clark, brother 
of the brave soldier who had conquered Indiana and 
Illinois for the United States during the Revolution. 
On May 14, 1804, they took boats at the little log- 
cabin villao^e called St. Louis at the mouth of the 
Missouri, which they began to ascend. By July 19, 
1805, after over a year's boating and carrying, they 
had gone four hundred leagues. Before them rose 
the sides of that tremendous cleft in the mountains, 
where the river breaks through six miles of a rocky 
wall twelve hundred feet high. This they named 
the Gates of the Rocky Mountains. The source 
of the Missouri is in the Madison River, which 
rises in the Yellowstone National Park. From the 
fountain to its fall into the Mississippi, it is three 
thousand miles long. 

Reaching the great divide of waters, the party 
began to travel overland. On the 7th of October, 
1805, having come to headwaters flowing in the 
other direction to the Pacific, they built canoes, and 
drifted down the river which they saw was even 
broader and more rapid than the Missouri. One 
month later, on November 7, they found them- 
selves near the mouth of this great stream, but in a 
heavy fog. As soon as the sun rent asunder the 



EXPLORATIONS WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 297 

veil of moisture, the Pacific Ocean dawned on their 
vision. Fourteen years before, Captain Robert 
Gray, a Rhode Islander, who was the first man to 
carry the American flag around the globe, had dis- 
covered this river and named it from his ship, the 
Coluntbia. Thus, indirectly, Christopher Columbus 
received recognition even on the Pacific. 

The two explorers took the same route back- 
ward, and reached St. Louis September 23, 1806. 
They had been absent thirty months, and had trav- 
elled over eight thousand miles. Their reports of 
the wonderful country traversed gave our Ameri- 
can people their first clear idea of the vast extent, 
the great possibilities of mineral and agricultural 
wealth, and the innumerable wonders in the Great 
West. 

The region of Oregon and Washington was prob- 
ably the first territory which the United States was 
able to claim directly by reason of exploration. 
Yet actual occupation and colonization were nec- 
essary to possession. It is even probable that, 
owing to the discoveries of Sir Francis Drake two 
centuries and a half before, analogous to those of 
the Cabots on the Atlantic front, Great Britain 
would have claimed and controlled this territory, 
had it not been for the American missionary Mar- 
cus Whitman, who with Dr. Parker was on gospel 
service among the Indians. 



298 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

When young Whitman heard of the proposition 
of British colonists to begin settlements on territory 
which is now in the state of W^ashington, he rode 
across the country in midwinter to give the news 
and urge action that would reflect the stars and 
stripes on the waters of Juan de Fuca. Surviving 
the awful hardships of that memorable ride, and 
emerging without scath from storms, floods, and 
hostile redskins, Whitman succeeded in stirring up 
the government at Washington to vigorous action. 
In the following summer, he led a caravan of nine 
hundred American colonists to that resfion. With 
wagons and horses, axes and rifles, they crossed the 
continent, settled the region, and secured it for the 
United States. Whitman was afterwards slain by 
Indians, but Whitman College is his memorial. 

Other vast areas were opened to native American 
explorers in the various tracts ceded to, or pur- 
chased by, the United States, — Florida in 18 19, 
the Texas annexation of 1845 and Cession of 1850, 
the Mexican Cession of 1848, and the Gadsden pur- 
chase of 1853. In 1867, Alaska was bought of 
Russia for seven million dollars. Explorers like 
Dall, Whymper, and Schwatka have already done 
much to make this vast region known. Rich in 
mines, furs, timber, and fish, Alaska also added five 
hundred and fifty thousand square miles to our ter- 
ritory; brought the frontier of our national domain 



EXPLORATIONS WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 299 

within seven hundred miles of Japan's most north- 
ern island, and made San Francisco the central city 
of the United States. From Eastport in Maine to 
Altoo the most westward Aleutian Island, the dis- 
tance is about six thousand five hundred miles, and 
the area of the United States is about three million 
six hundred thousand square miles. 

Not only in making known the sea-front and in- 
land waterways of the home of the nation by means 
of the hydrographic and geodetic surveys, but also 
in distant seas, the American government and pri- 
vate enterprise have been ever active. In many 
seas and near the poles, ever since we became a 
nation, the stars and stripes have been carried by 
our brave seamen. The exploring expeditions of 
Commodore Charles Wilkes in the Antarctic, and 
of Rear-Admiral John Rodgers into the Arctic 
seas, the gallant attempts to reach the North Pole 
or to rescue brave comrades, from Dr. Kane down 
to Lieutenant Peary and the Cornell glacier party, 
form a thrilling story in the annals of science, enter- 
prise, and courage. 

Thus, our story of the romance of discovery is 
finished, so far as relates to the United States, for 
comparatively little yet remains that may be called 
unknown land within our national domain. In the 
older states some portions, like the Everglades of 
Florida, are still but little visited, and regions like 



300 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY. 

the Adirondacks have only been recently opened 
or surveyed. In the far West, there are some 
areas still comparatively unknown and unoccupied. 
Alaska is but little developed. In the main, how- 
ever, the greater portion of our national territory 
has not only been discovered and explored, but its 
surface has been measured and mapped. 

In many of the states. New Jersey leading all, 
and in the territories also, the geological survey 
has been carried out to a wonderful degree. The 
student, with the aid of imagination, corrected by 
science, can see the invisible. He can picture in 
his mind the landscapes and water areas during the 
various QreoloQ:ic ao-es. In mental vision, he be- 
holds the great monsters sporting again in air, 
earth, and sea. He traverses the great forests that 
have made our coal. He notes the working of in- 
ternal forces and climatic agencies which have de- 
posited the elements and their combinations which 
in turn have produced ores, soils, forests, grass, sea- 
food, and shells. How these have given room and 
opportunity to the various tribes of animals and 
men to develop, can be discerned in outline. In 
the panorama of the earth's history, one sees the 
ice-cap covering like a great white sheet the north- 
ern half of the United States; watches the boulders, 
including Plymouth Rock, as they are transported 
from the north, and discerns the processes by 



EXPLORATIONS WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 30I 

which the great landmarks and headlands have 
been carved and shaped. 

Imagine the coming, the migrations, the distribu- 
tion of the first human inhabitants that ever gazed 
upon the glorious scenery of our beautiful land ! 
See some of them happy, well-fed, and comfortable ; 
others desolate, starving, and finally passing away. 
Behold their works in the mounds ! Pick up their 
relics on old battle and hunting grounds. Note 
that some of the favored races, like the Zuiii, hold 
their own for ages against powerful enemies. 
Others, like the Iroquois, rise into creditable forms 
of political life and society, with art and commerce 
and the deposits and bequests on tradition. 

Yet all these aboriginal races, even at their high- 
est, were below that line of ink that divides savage 
race from civilization, — the line of letters. For, 
except rude methods of counting time and hand- 
ing down traditions by means of knotted threads, 
notched sticks, and woven wampum, the Indian 
had nothing else by which to record and store up 
knowledge. There was no written history, and life 
without letters is death. Whether the Indian by 
himself could have invented an alphabet, we do not 
know. Sequoyah or George Guess, the maker of 
the wonderful Cherokee phonetic system, was a 
half-breed, with a German father and a Cherokee 
mother. 



302 THE ROMANCE OE DISCOVERY. 

With this mention of the red man's entrance into 
the reahii of letters, let our Romance of Discovery 
come to a close. We have seen that the story of 
the world's revelation is connected with the wander- 
ings of tribes and the misfrations of nations. It took 
men a lono: time to learn about other lands than 
that on which they or their fathers had been born. 
Only in the course of many centuries did they find 
that the earth was round and so very large. The 
replenishing of new continents has been the work 
of Christian peoples. When they first found out 
about new countries distant and wonderful, the 
earth seemed very large. Now that they have 
swift ships, fast railways, and telegraphs, and can 
go round the globe in a few weeks, meeting their 
friends and acquaintances in different parts of this 
planet, the earth seems smaller than it used to be. 
A commonplace remark is, " How very small the 
world is, after all." 

So it seemed, as I stood on the Grand Stand at 
the opening of the World's Columbian Exhibition 
in Chicago, May i, 1893. Among the vast assem- 
blage gathered in the White City on the shores of 
Lake Michigan, were men of nearly every nation 
under heaven. Scores of red Indians, Eskimos, 
Mexicans, Alaskans, West Indians, and South Amer- 
icans, mingled with Europeans, Asiatics, Africans, 



EXPLORATIONS WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 303 

Australians, and representatives of almost all the 
nations of the old world. 

My seat was but a few feet distant from that of 
President Cleveland. On the platform were gath- 
ered Japanese, Korean, Chinese envoys from the 
once Far East, but now, to us, the Near West. The 
descendents of Cohuubus and the potentates and 
commissioners from Europe, especially from the 
nations that had helped to discover or colonize 
America, had come from beyond the Atlantic. 

In front, lay the lake, with silent gondolas and a 
veiled colossal figure at the end. The flag-staves 
held only bundles. The fountain-basins were empty. 
The roof-lines of the great edifices were dull. The 
sky was overcast. 

Prayer to Almighty God, music, an address by 
the Director-General, preceded the thrilling moment 
of revelation. Then, the President of the United 
States advanced to touch an electric button. It 
was a moment pregnant with surprises. 

A crash of sound and a blaze of color followed. 

Cannon roared. Steam whistles blew their blasts. 
Bells rang their peals. The great engine set acres 
of machinery in motion with buzz and whirr. Huz- 
zas rent the air. 

This for the ear! 

Most glorious was the revelation of color to the 
eye. Electric fountains burst into bloom of spray, 



304 THE ROMANCE OF DISCOVERY, 

the sfolden statute of Columbia unveiled her re- 
splendent form. Aloft on their staves, the sailor's 
knots burst into a blaze of color and glory, as the 
flaes of Castile and AraQ-on floated on the breeze, 
beside the starry banner of the free republic. 

So culminated the Romance of Discovery. All 
due honor to Columbus and to those, also, who 
went before, or who followed after him ! 

Laus Deo. 



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Brain and Brawn Series. 

rHE BEACH PATROL. A Story of the Life-Saving 
Service. By William Drysdale. 318 pp. Cloth, ^1.50. 

The dangers and excitement of the Life-Saving Service are very graphically described 
and add to the general interest of the book. The real value of the story, however, lies 
in the fact, so clearly set forth, that it is possible for an earnest young man, of sterling 
integrity, to make an honorable place for himself in the world. It is a strong book, 
good for boys and young men. 

r'JIE YOUNG REPORTER. A Story of Printing 
House Square. By William Drysdale. 300 pp. Cloth, ^1.50. 

I commend the book unreservedly. — Golden Rule. 

"The Young Reporter" is a rattling book for boys. — Neiv I'ork Recorder. 

The best boys' book I ever read. — Mr. Phillips., Critic for New York Times. 

r'HE EAST MAIL. The Story of a Train Boy. By 
William Drysdale. 328 pp. Cloth, $1.50. 

"The Fast Mail " is one of the very best American books for boys brought out this 
season. Perhaps there could be no better confirmation of this assertion than the fact 
that the little sons of the present writer have greedily devoured the contents of the vol- 
ume, and are anxious to know how soon they are to get a sequel. — The Art Amateur, 
New York. 



Travel-Adventure Series. 

r\VER THE ANDES; or, Our Boys in Ne7v South 
\y America. By Hezekiah BaxTERWORTH. 368 pp. Cloth, 

$1.50. _ 

South America to-day presents a most interesting subject for study. Its history is one 
of a constant struggle for liberty against oppression. The cruelty and avarice of the 
Spanish conquerors was finally met by the solid opposition of the South American 
people. Out of the terrors of the Revolution came liberty and the wonderful commercial 
and industrial development for which South America is famous, as well as for her inex- 
haustible mineral wealth. 

The subject is an inspiring one, and Mr. Butterworth has done full justice to the high 
ideals which have inspired the great men of South America. 

/N WILD AFRICA. Adventures of Two Boys in the 
Sahara Desert, etc. By Thos. W. Knox. 325 pp. Cloth, 

$1.50. 
A story of absorbing interest. — Boston Journal. 

Our young people will pronounce it unusually good. — Albany Argus. 
He has struck a popular note in his latest volume. — Springjield Republican. 

rHE LAND OF THE KANGAROO. By Thos. 
W. Knox. Adventures of Two Boys in the Great Island Con- 
tinent. 318 pp. Cloth, $1.50. 
His descriptions of the natural history and botany of the country are very interesting. 

— Detroit Free Press. 

The actual truthfulness of the book needs no gloss to add to its absorbing interest. 

— 7"^!? Book Buyer, New York. 

Boston: W. A. Wilde ^ Co., 25 Bromjield Street. 



IV. A. Wilde &= Co.^ Publishers. 



Fighting for the Flag Series. 

MIDSHIPMAN JACK. By Chas. Ledyard Nor- 
ton. 290 pp. Cloth, $1.25. 

Tn th,. third volume of the " Fighting for the Flag Series." Jack is commissioned a 
■A w t^/n the n^iv but while on his way North to join his class in Newport, where 

as poSible and Jack soon receives an assignment to duty under one of his former ship- 
mates. .7,77-7 

(>fACK BENSON'S LOG; or, Afloat with the Flag in 
f '61. By Charles Ledyard Norton. 281pp. Cloth, $1.25. 

/Vn unusually interesting historical story, and one that will arouse the loyal impulses 
of etrrAmerlc'an boy^'or^girl. The story is distinctly superior to anything ever 
attemoted along this line before.— r/i^ /«'^'i?/^«'i^<?«'^- . . , ^r.A c\r\ Thp 

A sSry that will arouse the loyal impulses of every American boy and girl.- The 



M' 



Press. 



/I MEDAL OF HONOR MAN; or, Cruising among 
Jl Blockade Runners. By Charles Ledyard Norton. 280 pp. 

A brStbr'eiy' sequel to " Jack Benson's Log." The book has unusual literary 

excellence.— r/!^ ^^^^ ^'O"'''' ^'^«' ^^^^'^•^ , ,. ^7. 

A stirring stor y for boys.— Thejoitrfial, hidianapolis. __^^__^^^^ 

// SUCCESSFUL VENTURE. By Ellen Douglas 

^...Se^f'^ry ltissPg;ian?etr wtt^^'sa^ critic who is familiar wiU. the 

to write abou¥ them Her success has been wonderful, and yet m every sense merited 
^^S iccessSl Yen ure'' tells the story of a family of girls who found it necessary to 
mif thel own wayTn the world. They had a good deal to learn, and experience is ex- 
pensive, buJThey manage to meet all their obligations, with something to spare. 

Jl/TALVERN, A NEIGHBORHOOD STORY. By 

iVl Ellen Douglas Deland. 341 PP- ^^°*^' ,^V5°% , . ,;« 

Her descriptions of boys and girls are so true, and her knowledge of their ways is 
so accurate, SoCmust fe Jl an admiration for her complete mastery of her chosen 

'^^'msrDefaS'wa^fccoTded a place with Louisa M. Alcott and Nora Perry as a sue 
cessful writer of books for girls. We think this praise none too high. - T^ Post, 
IVaskin^iou. 

CUE ORCUTT. A Sequel to "The Orcutt Girls." By 
O Charlotte M. Vaile. 330 pp. Cloth, $1.50. , , ,. 

That the old-fashioned story still has\ ?harm has been amply demonstrated by he 
popularly of Mrs Vaile's "Orcutt (nrls," and a no less hearty welcome awaits the 
Lquel " Sue Orcutt," which finishes the story just as it should be ended. 

r^ HE ORCUTT GIRLS; or, One Term at the Academy. 
By Charlotte M. Vaile. 316 pp. Cloth, $1. 5a ^^ 
Two types of New England girlhood are illustrated in 1 J^e Orcutt^Girls -one Uie 
brisk nractical, domestic girl with a genius for housekeeping , the other, tne areamy, 
S^us and imaginative, with the true New England appetite for knowledge. 

Boston: W. A. Wilde 6- Co., 25 Bromfield Street. - 
3 



JV. A. Wilde &- Co., Publishers. 



nERAFH, THE LITTLE VIOLLNISTE, By Mrs. 
O C. V. Jamieson. 300 pp. Cloth, $1.50. 

The scene of the story is the French quarter of New Orleans, and charming bits of 
local color add to its attractiveness. — The Bosto7i Journal. 

Perhaps the most charming story she has ever written is that which describes Seraph, 
the little violiniste. — Trajiscript, Boston, 

JBOVE THE RANGE. By Theodora R. Jenness. 

^/Z 332 pp. Cloth, ^1.25. 

The quaintness of the characters described will be sure to make the story very pop- 
ular. — Book IVe^vs, Phila. 

A book of much interest and novelty. — The Book Buyer, Netv York. 

QUARTERDECK AND EOK'SLE. By Molly 

qJv Elliott vSeawell. 272 pp. Cloth, $1.25, 

^^^Miss Seawell has done a notable work for the young people of our country in her 
excellent stories of naval exploits. They are of the kind that causes the reader, no mat- 
ter whether young or old, to thrill with pride and patriotism at the deeds of daring of 
the heroes of our navy. 

QIG CYPRESS. By Kirk MuNROE. 164 pp. Cloth, 

#5 $1.00. 

If there is a man who understands writing a story for boys better than another, it is 
Kirk Munroe. — Spri7is; field Rep^tblican. 

A capital writer of boys' stories is Mr. Kirk Munroe. — Outlook. 

T^OREMAN JENNIE. By Amos R. Wells. A Young 

JP Woman of Business. 268 pp. Cloth, ^1.25. 

It is a delightful story. — The Adzmnce, Chicago. 
It is full of action. — The Standard, Chicago. 
A story of decided merit. — 'The Ep%vorth Herald, Chicago. 

ly/fYSTERLOUS VOYAGE OF THE DAPHNE. 
IVA. By Lieut. H. P. Wiiitmarsh. 305 pp. Cloth, $1.25. 

One of the best collections of short stories for boys and girls that has been published 
in recent years. Such writers as Hezekiah Lutterworth, Wm. O. Stoddard, and Jane G. 
Austin have contributed characteristic stories which add greatly to the general interest of 
the book. 

PHLLLP LEICESTER. By Jessie E. Wright. 264 
pp. Cloth, $1.25. 
The book ought to make any reader thankful for a good home, and thoughtful for the 
homeless and neglected. — Golden Rnle. 

The story is intensely interesting. — Christian Inquirer. 

r>iAP'N THISTLETOP. By Sophie Swett. 282 pp. 

O Cloth, $1.25. 

Sophie Swett knows how to please young folks as well as old ; for both she writes 
simple, unaffected, cheerful stories with a judicious mingling of humor and plot. Such 
a story is " Cap'n Thistletop." — The Outlook. 

rHE MAR/ORIE BOOKS. Edited by Miss Lucy 
Wheelock. 6 Vols. Over 200 Illustrations. The Set, $1.50. 
A very attractive set of books for the little folks, full of pictures and good stories. 

r^OT'S LLBRAR Y. Edited by Miss Lucy Wheelock. 
X--^ 10 Vols. Over 400 Illustrations. The Set, I2.50. 

In every way a most valuable set of books for the little people. Miss Wheelock 
possesses rare skill in interesting and entertaining the little ones. 

Boston : IV. A. Wilde &= Co., 25 Bromfield Street. 
4 



W. A. Wilde &> Co., Publishers. 



T 



'HE BEACON LIGHT SERIES. Edited by Nat- 
alie L. Rice. 5 Vols. Fully Illustrated. The Set, ^2.50. 



The stories contained in this set of books are all by well-known writers, carefully 
selected and edited, and they cannot, therefore, fail to be both helpful and instructive. 

ADY BETTY'S TWINS. By E. M. Water worth. 

117 pp. With 12 Illustrations. 75 cents. 



L 



The story of a little boy and girl who did not know the meaning of the word " obe- 
dience." They learned the lesson, however, after some trying experiences. 

rHE MOONSTONE RING. By Jenny Chappell. 
118 pp. With 6 Illustrations. 75 cents. 

A home story with the true ring to it. The happenings of the story are somewhat out 
of the usual run of events. 

-pELOUBETS SELECT NOTES. By F. N. Pelou- 
JL bet, D. D., and M. A. Peloubet. A Commentary on the Inter- 
national Sunday-School Lessons. Illustrated. 340 pp. Cloth, 

$1.25. 

This commentary is the one book every teacher must have in order to do the best 
work. It interprets the Scripture, illustrates the truths, and by striking comments 
convinces the mind. 

It is comprehensive, and yet not verbose, and furnishes winnowed material in the 
most attractive and yet convincing form from both spiritual and practical standpoints. 
Accurate colored maps and profuse original illustrations illuminate the text, and create 
an intelligent and instructive view of the subject matter. 

Teachers are invited to send for sample pages of " Select Notes." 

TT7AYS OE WORKING; or, Helpful Hints to Siinday- 
yy School Workers of all Kinds. By Rev. A. F. Schauffler, 
D. D. 216 pp. Cloth, $1.00. 

A really helpful manual for Sunday-school workers. — The Siatday-school Times. 

It unlocks the door to the treasure-house of Sunday-school success. — F. N. 
Peloubet, D. D. 

The best all-around book for a Sunday-school worker I know of. — Mario7i Law- 
rence, Secy Ohio State S. S. Association. 

Will take rank at once in Sunday-school literature, not only as a standard publica- 
tion, but as one of the most influential. — Congregatio7ialist , Boston. 

Cannot fail to be of value in the hands of all Sunday-school workers. — IV. H. Hall, 
Sec^y Of Conn. State S. S. Association. 

This book absolutely covers every phase of Sunday-school work in a clear, instruc- 
tive manner, and cannot fail to be of marked benefit to every worker. Send for sample 
pages. 

nPECIAL SONGS AND SER VLCES for Primary a?id 
kj Inlejynediate Classes. Compiled by Mrs. M. G. Kennedy. 160 
pp. Price, 45 cents; $40.00 per hundred. 

The book contains Exercises for Christmas, Easter, Children's Day, Harvest, etc. ; 
Lessons on Lord's Prayer, Commandments, Books of the Bible, Missions, and many 
other subjects. Adapted to Primary and Intermediate Classes, Junior Endeavor Socie- 
ties, etc. 

It has ninety pages of new, bright music for all occasions, including a large number 
of Motion Songs that are now so popular. We feel sure the book will prove instructive, 
interesting, and entertaining. It is printed on heavy paper, bound in board covers. 
Sample pages sent on application. 

Boston: W. A. Wilde 6^ Co., 25 Bromjield Street. 
5 



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